What's the buzz around data analyst jobs in Singapore?

With companies such as Amazon, Google, and Apple understanding and predicting their customers' behaviours for years, the banking industry has been slow by comparison to catch the digital and data analytics wave. As the popularity of online and mobile payment systems grows, banks are now moving quickly to hire specialists in big data analytics.

Singapore's Government has been promoting Singapore as an Asian data hub with data analytics expected to contribute $1 billion to the economy by 2017. The city state has long been seen as Asia’s answer to Silicon Valley and is increasingly encouraging banks to put their analytics operations in Singapore as it's a centre for wealth management and they believe clients are more likely to use mobile phones to interact with their banks.

Data Analysts are in demand because they can gather customer data from banking and social media platforms so that customers can be targeted with products tailored to meet their needs. By gathering this data the banks can also better predict and inform market movements.

So what skills and qualifications are needed for these jobs? Candidates traditionally come from backgrounds in computer science, statistics and maths - often from academic research positions or from customer-heavy industries like telecoms or online retailers. They use tools like Python, SAS, C++ to code and big data buzz words like Hadoop, Hive, and Pig.

They can't just be technical - presenting large amounts of data in a way that is easy for companies to digest and then act upon is a major challenge. Therefore Data Analysts and Scientists must have strong business analysis skills and the desire to learn about the business.

Banks are looking for candidates who can handle large amounts of data. They will build data warehouses to categorise and store the data, analytic tools to crunch the numbers, and sophisticated reporting and dashboards to display the information to the business in relevant ways in real-time.

Salaries are good and competition for talent is high - Data Scientists and Big Data Analysts will grow in influence and demand for their skills will only increase. And since it takes time to undertake the training necessary to work as a Data Analyst, there is a wage premium for these candidates.