Building on the idea that workers using ML and data science tools are a good measure of commercialization and diffusion, we merged existing data on the number of people with the title “Data Scientist” on LinkedIn at discrete points in time from June 2017-April 2021 to give some indication on the trend’s trajectory. The statistics are reported in this table.
Consistent with the pattern seen from our other metrics, it would appear that there was a noticeable decline in the growth of data science jobs during the period October 2019 to November 2020. However, since the economies have begun to reopen following the vaccine roll outs, we appear to be returning to a more robust growth environment. If the most recent trends continue, it would suggest that at least the downturn we see evidence of during the pandemic should have a short run impact on diffusion.
