Have you ever been in a situation where you need to spend a lot of your time and energy learning something, only to realize that the skills you have gained don’t match or live up to the requirements listed by the employer.
If this happens to you, you’ll have to begin learning new Technologies and skills to get the interview, which is one of the most painful and tedious tasks in the job searching process. Unfortunately, many people go through this tiresome loop.
With the recent buzz around machine learning many courses have come into existence offering a broad curriculum. This leaves job seekers confused about what they really need to learn to become machine learning engineers.
So today, we will try to find a solution and put you one step ahead of your rival Machine learning job seekers. After our previous analysis of data scientists job descriptions we have received new numerous requests from people, asking about a similar analysis on machine learning.
That is why we conducted this analysis in an identical manner by leveraging job boards data. We analyzed more than 500 recent machine learning engineer job postings, and this analysis was mainly focused on the USA.
Now let’s set our expectations straight from the start. We will try to answer the most common questions every machine learning engineer enthusiast needs to know what is the most sought after educational background to become an Machine learning engineer?
- What are the most important skills needed for a machine learning engineer?
- What is the experience required by employers?
- Which firms are offering more opportunities in the field?
- Which are the locations that offer the most opportunities?
If any of the above questions are on your mind? Stay tuned because you’ll Find the answers by the end of this Article. All right, let’s get started.
1. Education
First off All. What is the most sought after educational background? Well, this is one of the most common questions among job seekers. Because there is a lot of confusion in the job market. Nobody has a clear idea about, the ideal educational background required to become a machine learning engineer.
So let’s see what the data tells us. According to our research, most of the job postings require a master’s degree. There are almost as many listings asking for a PhD, as the ones looking for a master’s degree.
bachelor’s is the last on the list, but still has a very good number of openings. In addition, what is worth noting is that most of the job ads are flexible in terms of the type of degree for example, very often we can see bachelor’s as required and masters PHD as preferred.
What about degrees specialization then? Well, it appears that computer science with statistics, and mathematics as the not so close, second and third place are the three specializations employers are looking for the most electrical engineering, and physics are the other two most frequently sought for degrees.
2. Companies
Now that we’ve covered the degrees and fields of study required to become a machine learning engineer, let’s take a look at the companies that are actively recruiting. Who are they? Here are the top companies in our data set with the most openings. As you can see,
- Apple
- Amazon
- Snapchat
- Tiktoc,
These are some of the most exciting firms in the tech field which extensively rely on machine learning to run their platform. So No surprise here. Regarding company size, it is obvious that the majority of the offers are coming from big firms with more than 10,000 employees.
However, there is a considerable number of postings by both mid range firms 1000 to 10,000 employees and smaller firms with less than 500 employees.
Next in our study, we analyzed the industries with the highest concentration of machine learning engineer job offers. What did we discover?
unsurprisingly, there are more postings in the IT and retail wholesale industries at the moment. But these are far from your only options, as there’s a substantial number of offers in the consulting, education and finance industries as well.
All right, this gives us an idea about the company’s hiring Machine learning engineers. Let’s take a look at geography Shall we?
3. Job location
Here we split the data Based on the state and city where the offers came from, in terms of states, the majority of machine learning offers almost 50% of our data are from the state of California. After California, there seemed to be a good number of opportunities in New York, Washington hand Massachusetts.
If we consider cities where these jobs were available, we can see three important findings. One, there seem to be more offers in San Francisco and Santa Clara Valley. Two, there are a considerably good number of offers in New York City and Mountain View.
4. Experience
it’s time to pay attention to one of the crucial factors to land this lucrative job working experience. According to the data, there are generally more offers for people with at least two years of relevant experience.
For comparison, there seem to be more offers in the range of one to five years of experience and fewer opportunities for five plus years of experience candidates and freshers at the moment. And that’s certainly good news for those of you who considered many years on the job as a hard prerequisite for this position.
5. Degree
But let’s elaborate on the experience factor a bit more, this time in relation to degrees. On average, the experience required with a bachelor’s degree is four years, while for master’s degree, it’s roughly one year less, three years.
On the other hand, if you hold a PhD, then you’ll need two years of experience. However, there is a little catch here, as most of the recruiters haven’t mentioned the required experience for PhD holders specifically,
They mentioned Did in a generalized way required two plus years of experience with education in MS or PhD. So, overall, if you have a bachelor’s degree, you stand a pretty good chance with Machine learning employers, provided that you have worked for a few years and you have acquired some valuable experience.
6. Skillset
Alright, it’s time to dissect the most practical aspect of landing an Machine learning engineering job, the required skill set. In terms of general skills for the machine learning engineer position, we discovered the following to be a machine learning engineer.
Obviously, machine learning is the primary skill required. In addition, most of the jobs have mentioned deep learning and its fields like natural language processing, NLP and computer vision as a requirement.
But that’s not all. There have been plenty of mentions of data analytics stick testicle modeling and data visualization as well. Big Data version control tools like git, and deployment tools like Docker have been requested in quite a few descriptions too.
7. programming languages
How about we dive deep into each type of skills required, starting with programming languages? No surprise here, Python is leading the charge with a significant number. what’s worth noting is that c++ and Java are mentioned more more frequently than our mand SQL is mentioned in quite a few jobs as well.
8. framework
Continuing with the most sought after skills, we can’t skip deep learning frameworks, TensorFlow is leading our chart with Pytorch as a close second, then the top two are followed by caffe and Keras, TensorFlow and pytorch definitely look as the two most popular frameworks at the moment.
What about packages, being able to work with different packages that are suitable for the task at hand, is an essential skill for an Machine learning engineer. So let’s examine the most frequently requested Machine learning packages for Python.
Scykit learn where most of the machine learning algorithms and all other important functions are available is listed as the top package, followed by pandas, one of the most important library for all data manipulation Activities in third place, we have numby and Scipy, where basically all the important math functions reside.
9. Big Data technologies
Okay, it’s time to take a look at Big Data technologies. spark tops the list with a significant lead over Hadoop. While hive and Kafka have been mentioned in fewer job postings, in terms of cloud technologies.
AWS is the most in demand cloud technology at the moment with Google’s GCP and Microsoft Azure following in its footprints, our data visualization skills important for an Machine learning engineer,
According to the data, not really. In fact, there are very few mentions of data visualization tools for machine learning jobs, Tableau was mentioned just 15 times, whereas Power BI only two times,
which makes it clear that the default packages in Python should suffice for aspiring Machine learning engineers when it comes to data visualization.
10. communication skills
And last on the list of Machine learning engineer job requirements commn communication skills. This one is slightly different than all the other skills we have seen until now. Apart from regular technical skills, communication skills appear to be equally important.
Let’s see how many jobs have mentioned strong communication skills explicitly. 220 jobs have a mention of communication skills as a definite requirement for the desired candidate. Now you’ve got a good idea about the skills and education required to land a machine learning engineer job.
One last piece of advice from our side. Knowing technology is one thing and applying it is a whole different thing. So to be successful in the ML field, learn the most And important skills first,
then try to solve a real world problem by combining all your skills to get a more real lifelike experience. Remember machine learning is a very dynamic field so be ready to upgrade yourself every day.
If you have any doubts or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments. We are happy to help
