203: There’s No More Data Analyst Jobs

There's no more data analyst jobs left. That's what I keep hearing, especially on YouTube, but that is a complete lie. In today's episode, I'm gonna show you why I think there's actually a lot of data analyst jobs left and why you should not panic. But if you're new here, my name is Avery Smith. I'm a senior data analyst, and I make content about how to thrive in your data career, especially if you're just getting started. The real question is who is saying that data jobs are dead? Who's saying that there's no more data analyst jobs left. And really I think it comes down to, there's three different groups that are sharing this narrative all over the internet. The first group is YouTubers who are like me, and they are carrying this narrative around that data analyst jobs are dead. There's a great data analyst crash that has occurred or is coming, that there's no more data jobs. And I'll be honest, I've even been complicit in some of my titles and thumbnail choices here on YouTube. So why are YouTubers creating these titles and these contents, why are they spreading this message around if it is a lie? Well, honestly, it's because you guys click on those videos. I shared this in a recent episode, but I actually AB tested two different thumbnails. One that was positive, like there's lots of data jobs in the future, and one that's negative, that there's no data jobs in the future. The video content stayed the exact same. The thumbnail stayed the same, and the negativity won. Everyone wanted to click on the negativity. It actually won by two times. So basically two times more of you guys clicked on that video than the positive one. So it just really goes to show, especially on YouTube, that negativity wins. But we've already known that because that's why the news is negative. Like we as humans, for some reason, just love negativity and for YouTubers, Hey, if we can create videos that you guys love, then we wanna do it. But personally, I want to be honest, I'd rather be honest than be negative. I'm an optimistic person, so I try to make my episodes as optimistic as possible. Of course, with keeping it realistic, I don't wanna just gaslight you guys and tell you that there's lots of data jobs left if there are none. But I wanna keep it honest and optimistic. Now, sometimes I might use a title or a thumbnail that might be more negative so I can get more people to click. But I justify that because my message is honest and uplifting and optimistic, and in order for more people to get that message of, Hey, there is lots of data jobs, you can actually do this. We might need to lure them in with some sort of negativity. The second group who is saying there's no more data jobs left are job seekers. And this actually makes sense because if you're trying to land a data job right now, it can feel like there's no data jobs left because you're applying. To hundreds of data jobs probably, and not getting any calls back, not getting any interviews, and that can be really frustrating. And so you can be like, oh my gosh, there's no data jobs left. I can't land the role, I can't land an interview. This sucks this, you know, industry, this career isn't for me. But it's important to highlight that these job seekers, although their experiences are lived and true. It's not really data driven, it's not really analytical, it's just more of an experience they've lived. There's no actual data or truth behind it. But look, I get it. There's ghost jobs out there. There's fake jobs out there. There's scam jobs out there, and landing a real job feels impossible. So I totally get if your job secret and you feel like there's no data jobs left, because that's how it feels. It makes sense. The third group that is sharing this message across the internet are AI maximalist. And these are people who really believe in ai, that it's the future, that there's going to be a GI, that robots and, uh, AI agents are gonna rule the world. And of course they think if they think that they're gonna think there's no more data jobs, nevertheless, no more any jobs that these agents will just take all of the jobs. So those are the three groups that I think are really spreading this message across the internet. And as a bonus fourth group, I would just say pessimists in in general, people who who see the cup as half empty instead of half full will think that there's no jobs, that everything's doom and gloom, that everything's going to end. If you're one of these pessimists or people who think there is no more data jobs, or that data jobs won't exist in the future, I hope that I will be able to change your opinion during this episode. What is the evidence? Well, I'm gonna show you six real pieces of evidence that data jobs aren't dead and they even might be thriving. The first piece of evidence I want to show you comes from a research study done by Bloomberg where they basically analyzed 180 million global job postings from January, 2023 to October, 2025. This was all scraped from RA and they found some really interesting things I wanna share with you. One of their key takeaways was that data related jobs are holding up despite AI tools. So basically despite what you might be thinking AI tools can do to replace a data analyst, data scientist, we don't see that in industry yet, and those roles are actually growing. It basically says that even though AI tools can write SQL queries or write Python code, that the data analyst or the person actually using those tools is still very valuable. Despite these AI tools, knowing what questions to ask still really important. Knowing if you can trust data or if you could, what data's clean and what data's not clean. Still really important. Knowing how the data and the analysis that you find ties into the business and being able to convince stakeholders and non-technical people of your findings still really important and really needs a human to do all of those things. One of the things it also mentions is you can kind of use software engineering and software development jobs as a proxy for data jobs. 'cause they're very closely related. They're both very technically focused. They're a little bit different. But you can kind of see some similarities in software development and data analytics and data scientists and all those different things. And that's really key because one of the things that actually found in this study was that software engineering jobs have stayed really resilient. Of course, we've seen some decrease in front air engineering and mobile engineering as that's gotten easier and easier. But other things like machine learning, engineering, data engineer, backend engineer, data scientists, and honestly, these aren't really even software engineering jobs almost. These are data jobs. So like software engineering is doing well if it's data related. And all the things that we're talking about on this channel is all data related. So basically with ai. AI is just so dependent on data and we are the best people fit for talking about data, thinking about data processing data, analyzing data, structuring data, shipping data. That's us. And the best place to start for any data role is a data analyst, because it's one of the lowest on the totem pool. It can get, obviously very senior as you go on, but it's like a really good entry point where you could become a data scientist later down the road. You could become a DevOps engineer down the road. You could become, you know, a data engineer down the road. This is like the entry point of the data world, and this data family, this data role kingdom that we play in is the number one. Kingdom, the number one job family for handling ai, maybe other than software developers, but you could argue that we know a little bit more about data than they do. The second piece of evidence I want to present to you is from live data Technologies, and they use a special proprietary software to basically figure out how many different data analysts are there in the world. How many different lawyers are there in the world, how many different, you know, real estate agents are there in the world. And we can actually see that data analytics, data analyst jobs have grown since 2021. Uh, about 12%. Now, has it been stagnant in the last two years? Uh, maybe. But you have to remember that in 2021, in 2020, during COVID. There was a lot of over hiring going on, so the fact that it really hasn't gone down is a good sign. I think this year we'll start to see this grow a little bit more like data engineering. I think data engineering has really exploded because once again, in order for AI models to be good, you need good data engineering. In order to have good data engineering, you need to have good data engineers. And honestly, I don't really ever see people just starting from zero to data engineer. They always start in some different role. For instance, like a software engineer or the second most common one I think is a data analyst. You go from data analyst, data engineer. So if you want to ultimately work in data engineering, a data analyst is a really first good landing place because it's way easier to become a data analyst than as a data engineer. There's a lot less tech that you have to know, a lot less programming, and you can start to get paid to learn data engineering on the job. So once again, no evidence here that data analyst jobs are dead. The third piece of evidence I wanna look at actually comes from the World Economic Forum, and they did this big study to try to figure out what they think the top growing jobs are going to be in the next five years, even with all this AI disruption. And if you check out this graph that Euro News made of their data, you'll actually see something that's quite promising. A good chunk of these top jobs are very data related. Now, of course, you're not gonna see data analysts necessarily in the top five. You think it's number eight or number nine. But big data specialists, like big data specialists start their careers as data analysts, AI and machine learning specialists. Once again, if you want to become that, that's gonna take like three years to learn all that stuff. So start small as a data analyst. Data warehousing specialists. That's basically data analysts. Data engineers, data analytics, engineers. And what these bars or these numbers represent is the percent that they're gonna grow over the next five years or so. So we are seeing a lot of growth in these jobs over the next five years, according to, you know, one of the most prestigious organizations in the world. So I don't think they think that data analyst jobs are dead. My fourth piece of evidence comes from another really prestigious organization, and that's the Bureau of Labor Statistics from the United States. This is one of the biggest organizations actually tracking employment and job statistics over time. And what do they think about data jobs. Now they don't actually specifically analyze data analyst jobs as a job role or job family, but they do data scientist jobs and let's see how they do over the next 10 years. The BLS basically predicts that the data scientist job will grow 34%, and that's actually the fourth fastest growing job family in their entire report. So honestly, if you want a career that is growing over the next 10 years, the BLS thinks that this data science world that you can play in is one of the best places you could possibly be. And you can actually look at this graph and see how that compares to what they think all occupations will grow in on average. And that is just 3%. So like literally, this is one of the best places you could. And not only is it data scientist jobs, it's like really all data jobs. They said this tied to the increased use of AI is this massive increase in the volume of data generated, which is expected to fuel job growth among many mathematical science occupations. Relevant occupations include data scientists, actuaries, and operations research analysts, all of which are projected to see job growth of at least 20% between 2024 and 2034. Placing them all in the top 15 fastest growing occupation lists. And I actually created a little bit of a table for you that shows that computer and info research scientists, statisticians, market research analysts, and database admins and architects are all supposed to grow quite a bit more than average over the next 10 years. Once again, this prestigious organization. Not really indicating that there's no more data jobs. If anything, there's gonna be a lot more data jobs now in the world and that is X or Twitter. Put your political leanings aside. X is still used as one of the places to get up to date information and there's been a huge growth in automatic. Coding, basically programming, coding over the last six months where it's like, oh, software jobs are dead. You know, Claude code, it's so good, it's gonna replace, you know, my, my software developers and there's gonna be no more software engineering jobs. I'm sure those videos exist, uh, on YouTube as well. And we've seen a really weird twist in the last few weeks where there's actually a lot more software development jobs. They're growing. So software jobs aren't dead. They're growing and if there's one thing we know about software jobs is they kind of mirror these data roles. There is a little bit difference between the two, right? Where obviously data people aren't really creating software and software aren't really analyzing data. But there is a lot of overlap and a lot of similarities and I think AI will enhance or disrupt them almost equally. Maybe not quite, but we can learn a lot of lessons from software engineering. 'cause I do think they're about one to two years ahead of the data industry in terms of using and utilizing ai. So in the future we might see a similar trend where maybe there is a little bit less data jobs, who knows? But then I think it will bounce back as well. And to be honest, that's every market, for every history of time, there's gonna be ebbs and flows on the number of jobs available. No matter if you're a firefighter, no matter if you're a teacher, no matter if you're a nurse, there's gonna be ups and there's gonna be data. My sixth piece of evidence is that this isn't actually a new question, although there's a lot of people saying that data jobs are dead or questioning if data jobs are gonna die right now in 2026, and it happened in 2025 and 2024. This actually isn't a new question as almost existed as long as the term data analytics and data science has existed. Let me actually show you a few examples. So in 2021, before chat, GPT even existed, my good friend Ken G, wrote a medium article asking, is data science dead in 10 years? That was really before all of this, you know, LLMs and generative AI had really taken off, and he was asking that question. We're about exactly halfway through that mark, and of course, we're still yet to see, but so far there's still a lot of data jobs. In fact, there hasn't been really a decrease. As I showed you guys earlier, uh, there's really just been either a stagnation or a slight increase in 2017. One of the most trusted data organizations, Gartner, that is like consulting and software evaluations and stuff like that. They had a headline that says. More than 40% of data science tasks will be automated by 2020. Well, guys, we're six years past 2020. I definitely don't think 40% of data science tasks have been automated. Now you can say they were just early on their prediction, or you can say that they're flat out wrong. In the 2010s, there was a lot of hype on no-code tools in general and things like DataRobot and Alteryx and all these different like no-code, uh, analytics platforms. And those were gonna take all of the jobs back then. Well, it's not really true. Those just created more jobs and we still have lots of data jobs more than ever. Actually in 2016, people were on subreddits asking, is data science getting overcrowded? People think it's overcrowded today, people thought it was overcrowded 10 years ago. If they could see today, they'd have no idea how. Under crowded. It was at the time, who knows, in 2036 we might be saying the exact same thing. Is data science overcrowded? And we didn't know how good, uh, you know, that we had it in 2016 or how good it was going to be in 2036. In 20 15, 1 of the biggest data blogs ever, Katy Nuggets actually ran a poll that asked, will data science tasks be automated by 2020 or 2025? And a lot of people thought it was going to be automated, everything was gonna be gone. And guess what? We've passed that. It's not automated. There's still lots of jobs, there's lots of opportunities for us. So, you know, even 10 years ago people were thinking this. And as early as in 2013, a really popular data author wrote a blog post titled The Bursting of the Big Data Bubble Guys, that was in 2013. I don't think the big data bubble has burst yet. It's only grown bigger and bigger and bigger. So if in 2013 they thought they were in a bubble. How big is the bubble today? How much bigger is data today than it was in 2013 and they thought it was gonna be over. But my advice to you at this point so far is don't panic. Don't freak out. Don't give up, because it seems like there's gonna be no data jobs left. There's gonna be data jobs left, I promise. Personally, I think you should live by this quote, which actually came out of a Matt Schumer article that went really viral on X, called Something Big is Happening. It's kind of an AI doomsday type article, but he said something really important at the end about a lawyer speaking about his lawyer friend that has just dabbled in ai. He said if it stays on this trajectory, it being ai, he expects it will be able to do most of what he does before long, and he's a managing partner with decades of experience. He's not panicking, but he's paying very close attention. And that's my recommendation to you guys is don't panic, but pay close attention to all this AI things. Start to integrate AI learning and everything that you're doing on top of your data analytics learning. And that's something I'm gonna be trying to do on this channel, specifically on my newsletter as well. I'm gonna start to try to help you become an. AI native data analyst or an AI fluent data analyst. So if that sounds interesting to you and you actually want those tips delivered to your inbox every single week, you can join 50,000 other aspiring data professionals@datacareerjumpstart.com slash newsletter, and it's absolutely free to join. Guys, stay positive. Data jobs aren't dead. There's lots of data jobs left and there will be in the future. That's my message to you and I hope you take it to your heart.