Case Studies

While we’ve been busy surveying professionals on how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the analytics workforce over the past few months (view our data and insights on that here), we also wanted to share some of what we’ve learned about impacts to analytics students and recent graduates.We reached out to a number of professors and analytics students to ask them about how the ongoing crisis has impacted their programs, and of the 30 or so schools that we heard back from, the figures were quite striking. Note: this blog focuses on impacts to 2020 data science & analytics graduates looking to enter the workforce, but you can read more about our findings on analytics internships in this post.The following data represents the percentage of programs who reported that any of their students had been impacted by the following situations, and in many cases there were several different impacts at the same program. To respect student privacy, these data do not reflect percentages of individual students.

We found that the vast majority of programs – 90% – had at least some of their job seeking students impacted in some way by COVID-19. The most common impact was disruption of interviews, which is not surprising considering how many companies have been freezing their hiring or even going through layoffs. Unfortunately, 37% of schools we talked to knew of students who had secured job offers which ended up being rescinded.Linda Burtch also spoke with Michael Rappa, who is the Director of Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, a top notch analytics program, and who was willing to share some of his data with us about how COVID-19 had impacted his graduates.

As you can see, there was a noticeable dip in the placement rate for NCSU compared to average years which reflects the overall uncertainty in the analytics job market at the moment.

There was also a decrease in the average number of job offers per student, from 2.5 in 2019 to 2.1 in 2020, and several students had job offers either put on hold or rescinded altogether.Another interesting piece of information he was able to share was his data on entry-level data scientist job postings on LinkedIn, and how that has dipped recently as well.

As we’ve noted in our previous reporting on overall data scientist job postings, job postings are an imperfect measure of job market activity, but the downward trend coupled with the results of our recent Analytics Impact survey with the IIA suggests that overall, analytics teams are feeling the heat and hiring has slowed down for many employers.

Looking for More Information?

If you’re interested in more information about this, you can find all of our COVID-19 blog posts here. Linda Burtch also presented this data and many other insights on the analytics hiring market at the INFORMS 2020 virtual conference, and you can view the recording and her slides here.We’ll be sure to keep posting updates as the situation continues to evolve, so keep an eye out for more information over the coming months!