Exploring Analytics-Related Occupations: A Data Mining Perspective on US Labor Market Insights for Analytics Students and Graduates

This chapter offers an in-depth analysis of analytics-related occupations within the US labor market, with a primary focus on providing valuable insights to students seeking the best job application strategies. Employing various data mining techniques, including Exploratory Data Analysis, Time Series Analysis, Clustering Analysis, and Association Rules Analysis, we examine the trends and statistics surrounding these occupations over the past ten years, drawing from historical job posting data aggregated from Lightcast. The research investigation encompasses critical aspects such as essential skill requirements, the most prevalent job titles, geographical job distribution, participating industries and companies, as well as compensation and benefits associated with each occupation. Furthermore, we explore the grouping of occupations that share similar characteristics and identify the skills frequently sought after by employers in analytics-related job postings. Additionally, the research also provide job posting forecasts and other pertinent information for each occupation, equipping students to make well-informed career decisions. Descriptive analytics on the most popular analytics-related occupations and job titles, salary and wage ranges for each occupation, the most sought-after skills, industries and companies with the highest job postings, cities with the most job postings, time series decomposition revealing trends and seasonality in job postings, occupational groupings, and frequently co-occurring skills in job postings were generated as the results of the research. These research results are conveniently hosted on GitHub in the form of interactive and user-friendly Jupyter Notebooks static website. This platform allows students to engage with the analysis results, presented as Power BI Dashboards and Plotly Visualizations, facilitating informed decision-making. By leveraging data mining techniques to dissect the analytics-related job landscape, our research serves to inform analytics students and graduates about the diverse career opportunities available. It provides guidance on crafting effective job application strategies and ultimately supports their post-education professional journey.