Are you trying to make a career switch to data science for getting a salary bump? Well, the move is entirely justified! However, it isn’t as straightforward as you might think. There are certain things, such as work experience and your current domain, that will play a MASSIVE role in deciding your salary post-transition.
Taking figures from the popular and relatively accurate website called Glassdoor, this is what the salary situation looks like for a data scientist:
As you can observe, in India, the average salary of a data scientist is approximately INR 10,00,000 per year . Whereas, the average salary for the same in the USA is a whopping $134,000 per year . (there is definitely a big gap there!)
If you bring a bit more experience to the table and you have relevant domain experience, you might look at a more senior role (though this is a bit rare if you have no prior data science experience):
As a senior data scientist, you will be looking around an average salary of approximately INR 19,00,000 per year in India. In the USA, you can expect an average salary of a whopping $134,000 per year.
As we said, it comes down to how relevant your previous experience is. More often than not, as a person transitioning from a non-data role to data science, you’ll be looking at the first graph whereas, if you have been previously working in the data industry, you might be eligible for a senior data science role, which is the second graph.
Data Science is one of the most exciting and upcoming roles in the industry with a lot of growth and financial potential. As we have noticed in so many reports, there are plenty of data science jobs out there but there’s a big caveat! There are not as many skilled data science professionals for these job roles.
A recent Gartner report projects that there will be approximately 2.3 million new jobs created by the year 2021 in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.