193: My HONEST Thoughts on The Data Job Market in 2026

If you're breaking into data analytics right now, you're probably pretty depressed and pretty anxious with everything that's going on. It feels like there's no data jobs left. The few data jobs that are left are uber competitive, and the rest of the data world is just going to be replaced by AI by the end of the year. If you feel this way, I don't blame you. It's super easy to fail this way in today's market, but I'm going to share some raw, transparent numbers that I think is gonna give you a little bit of hope and a little bit more insights to what the data market is. Actually like right now and what you can expect moving forward. The first question you probably have is, are data rolls die? And the answer is no, but a lot of them aren't growing either. Let me explain. So this chart right here shows the growth of data rolls over the last four years. You see that data engineer roles have grown 49%. Data analyst roles have grown about 12.6%, and data scientists have grown about 11.7%. What this basically means is if there was a hundred data engineers, data analysts and data scientists, at the end of 2021, there is now 149 data engineers, 113 data analysts and 112 data scientists. And so your first thought might be, wow, look at data engineers. Like they have grown a lot and the answer is yeah, they've grown a ton. And one of the reasons why is ai, AI is only as good as the data you feed it. And data engineers are really good at storing big data and cleaning big data. And that's exactly the type of things that AI companies need to actually make useful models. So that's one of the reasons why we see a really big growth of data engineers. The other reason I think we're seeing a big growth of data engineers is we overhyped data analysts and data scientists. The data scientists role was actually voted the most sexy data title of. The 21st century. And the answer is, data science is really cool, but it, once again, if you don't have really structured, really clean, well stored data, you can't actually do that much. And so data engineers basically didn't exist 10 years ago really, as at least the way that they do today. And so we were trying to do all these really cool data analytics and data science projects without proper data engineering. And that led to a lot of data science projects failing. Now we're kind of going backwards as a society and being like, okay, we need data engineering. We need data engineers to build the fundamentals of a good foundation that we can actually build our data analytics and data science projects on top of. So I think we had a little bit of false, like mega growth for data science and analytics in the past decade. And now data engineering is just kind of catching up. Now. It is important to actually realize this is growth. This is actually raw numbers. So right now there's actually. 51,000 open data analyst jobs on LinkedIn across the world. And there's only 25,000 open data engineer jobs and even less 13,000 open data scientist jobs. So although data engineer has grown quite a bit in the last four years, it's still nowhere as large as the number of data analyst jobs that are open in the world right now. Now let's talk about the data analyst and the data scientist role over the last four years. Growth has kind of become stagnant in the last two years. Now why is that? There's lots of options. You could argue that AI is the reason, but for me, once again, I think companies are investing in their data organizations, but specifically they're putting an emphasis on the data engineering because they know if they get the data engineering right, and they do that well, the data analytics and data science teams and projects will kind of follow after that. Also, I think it's important to realize that there's a lot of pressures going on in the world. Specifically what I know is the us there's like a crazy political thing going on where there's tariffs. No, there's not tariffs, there's visas, there's no visas. Like the stock market is up and down every day. Like things are a little bit tight. It feels like we're gonna have a recession or a financial crash soon, but it hasn't happened. I've been waiting years for it to dip down, so I could buy the dip, but it just keeps going up and up. So I think to stay stagnant isn't actually necessarily bad. There's not less data jobs, it's just like we're in a weird place where we're trying to see what's happening. Now personally, if I'm being 100% honest and transparent. I really see this trend continuing through the rest of this year. For the most part, I think a lot of companies will still put most of their investment into data engineering to try to get that sound foundation. Although I could see a lot of companies have already done that, and so you might see a slight uptick in data analysts just because there's quick wins for data analysts to have once that foundation is laid. By the way, this is the type of analysis graphs and data that I try to share every week in my newsletter that's specifically for data professionals. It's a hundred percent free and it's 25,000. Other aspiring data professionals have already joined, so why not join them? Go to data career jumpstart.com/newsletter or click the link, the description down below. The next question you might be asking is, well, there's no data jobs left. What companies are even still hiring data analysts? And you might think it's the FANG companies, but really it's not. So who are the companies hiring the most data analysts? Well, this chart right here basically shows you the top 20 companies that hired data analysts in the previous year. And number one, we have Accenture two, Amazon three, McKenzie four, Deloitte, five C. Six American Express seven, capital one eight Tata Consultancy, uh, nine Cognizant and 10, uh, TD Ameritrade. You can read the rest of the list down below. Now, if you really analyze this list, what you'll notice is most of these companies are either consulting companies or financial service companies and bank. And that's really important to realize because a lot of people think in order to work for data companies, you have to work for like Microsoft or like Google or like Apple, and that's really just not the truth. Obviously the tech companies are really cool and they have cool products, but there's so many companies. Basically every company needs. Data people, they need people to look at the numbers to actually make data-driven decisions for their business, whether they're a hospital or a bank, or even like a mom and pop shop, like data analysts are needed everywhere. So although you might really wanna work for a tech company, and tech companies are cool, just remember there's so many other options out there. And my suggestion is really to probably focus on these consulting and financial service companies because these are the people who are looking like they're dedicated to paying and hiring data professionals moving forward in this challenging, tight economic time. And at this point you might be wondering, well, Avery, where did you get all of this data? Like is it even valid? And the answer is, I got it from a company called Live Data Technologies. They're a data product, and if you listen to an episode that I released recently, or you're subscribed to my newsletter, you learned what a data product is. But basically they sell data as a service and they're tracking working professionals in real time so that you can actually see where people are going, how companies are shifting, what roles are going up, what roles are going down, what companies are actually hiring, what companies are firing, those types of things. And they were actually kind enough to send this data to me and let me share it with all of you. So if you wanna learn more about them, you can check their link in the show notes down below. Next, I have a lot of people come up to me on LinkedIn or in person and they'll say, Hey, Avery, tech roles, they're cooked, meta just laid off this many people. Intel just did 20,000 layoffs, like with no warning whatsoever. It's over for data jobs, it's over for tech jobs. But here's the truth, you might be missing once again, the big F companies. They dominate the headlines. Yes, they're the biggest companies and maybe they're the most important to the US economy. Sure. But there's still thousands of other companies who are hiring data people all the time who maybe aren't laying anyone off right now who are maybe hiring right now. And to illustrate this, I'd like to actually share a personal story of layoffs that. Completely affected my life and is probably the reason I'm here talking to you. This chart right here is comparing and contrasting the stock price of ExxonMobil to the stock price of meta or the stock price of Facebook from 2019 to 2021. And the reason I'm showing you this is at the time I was actually employed at ExxonMobil as a data scientist. We had layoffs. My own team had layoffs and everyone on my team was like, oh my gosh, ExxonMobil, it's going in the pooper. It stinks. It's a bad company. Look at Meta Meta's basically doubled their stock price recently. We need to get out of oil, we need to get outta manufacturing. We need to get to big tech. 'cause they're hiring so many people right now. Their stock price is doing so well. Our stock price stinks. You know, we're on the decline. Everything's gonna go terribly. We should all leave and we should go to meta. Now, watch what happened in 2021 and see if we were right or if we were wrong. At the beginning of 2021, meta stock was doing fine, but then it took a huge dive and basically lost 50% of their value. Meta had a ton of layoffs this year while ExxonMobil doubled their stock price back to basically what it was originally. Now, Exxon was hiring data scientists and Meta was laying off data scientists. The point here is if a company's laying people off, you don't know if that's going to magically just be the opposite the next year. And even if layoffs are happening in the tech industry or whatever industry, there's probably another industry that is booming that needs to hire data scientists, data engineers, data analysts, data scientists. They're needed in every industry. Financing, consulting, manufacturing, tech, like literally every industry needs data professionals. And just because the FANG companies are laying people off doesn't mean that other companies, for instance, like ExxonMobil aren't hiring. Let's flip over to 2023 to today, and sure enough, meta, even though it seems like they might even do layoffs right now, has four x their stock price and ExxonMobil is staying pretty steady. They're up about 20% still, and they're still hiring at a very sustainable pace. My point here is don't stress because people are doing layoffs or 'cause they're hiring or they're not hiring, because you never know how it's affecting other industries and how that company might actually just do hiring in the next year. By the way, I used AI almost exclusively to create this chart right here. Pretty cool, right? Well, you're kind of wrong because this chart sucked to make with ai. At first, I asked it to go download the historic stock data for ExxonMobil and Meta, and it said that it did it and it created these charts. But I looked at the data and some things looked a little bit too perfect and a little bit too linear, and so I went and investigated on my own, and sure enough, it literally just made up the stock price data. It didn't get even remotely close. And I was about to show thousands of you false data created by ai. Then it still took me like three hours to make this chart, which honestly, I think I could have made this entire thing in three hours just using Python with no ai. And finally I got to the chart where it was almost ready to show you guys like I wanted to clean some things up. For instance, I wanted to move the title from Behind these filters right here. I wanted to remove my grid lines and I wanted to create some captions here. I ran out of Claude Credits to actually edit this graph. So all of this to say, I don't think you're cooked. I don't think data jobs are dead, and I don't think AI is going to replace you. I think the data job market right now is about what it should be in a tight economy. So if you enjoyed this positive outlook, do me a favor, hit like and hit subscribe because I have a lot more data content I wanna share with you this year.