Data Science Job Market Research in Ukraine, January-June 2021

Since the beginning of 2020, the Faculty of Applied Sciences of UCU has begun to study more closely the vacancy market in Ukraine for positions related to Data Science. Based on these studies, we publish a report with the main insights every half year. The first annual report for 2020 was published in January 2021, and now we invite you to read the semi-annual report for January – June 2021.

In order to identify trends in the field of Data Science in major cities of Ukraine (Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro), we conducted dynamic research of vacancies on the sites dou.ua and djinni.co from 2020. During the first half of the 2021 year, more than 1120 vacancies were posted in the field of Data Science (according to the category of Data Science on dou.ua and djinni.co, which includes data scientists, data engineers, data analysts, CV / ML / DL / NLP engineers). While for the same period in 2020 there were 660 vacancies (growth by 70%).

If we compare the first half of these years, in 2021, the supply of vacancies has good indicators and is mainly growing in comparison with the last year. The obvious reason for the fall in the number of vacancies in the spring was the spread of COVID-19 in the world.

We also decided to estimate the ratio of the number of vacancies in the field of Data Science to the total number of vacancies in IT (data dou.ua jobs.dou.ua/trends) by cities:

January-June 2021

2020 

As can be seen from the above graphs, although Kyiv is the leader in the number of vacancies, if we take the ratio of data science to the entire industry, then smaller cities, such as Lviv or Odesa, are often in the lead. Certain spikes in the share of DS vacancies (such as in April or August-September 2020 in Odessa) can be partly explained by the publication of a series of vacancies from one company looking for specialists for a new project.

In the first half of 2021, the most popular on the above sites, as in 2020, are the positions of Data Scientist (295 vacancies), Data Engineer (244 vacancies), the position of Data Analyst (169 vacancies) is also quite common. Demand for positions in different categories of Data Science, taking into account the level of professionalism, are shown in the diagram below.

* Vacancies without the specified level of experience are not taken into account

As for the difference in demand by the level of experience, the graphs show that most often looking for Data Engineer with experience level Middle (whereas in 2020 it was Senior), Junior Data Scientist (as in 2020), Junior ML Engineer (in 2020 – Middle), Junior Data Analyst (as in 2020), as for NLP Engineer / CV Engineer / DL Engineer, the demand is quite low at all levels.

The total number of vacancies across the cities

As usual, most vacancies were located in Kyiv (891 vacancies), but compared to 2020, Lviv (270 vacancies) is ahead of Kharkiv (246 vacancies), followed by Odesa (128) and Dnipro (126). Moreover, the share of vacancies in the regions is beginning to increase compared to Kyiv (for example, in the first half of 2020, Kyiv outperformed Lviv 5 times, while now this advantage has dropped to 3.3).

* Some vacancies are taken into account several times because the sites often indicate several cities for one vacancy. 

The total number of vacancies by the level of experience

As for the distribution of vacancies by professional level, the greatest demand, as in 2020, is for Junior (454 positions), but Middle (389 vacancies) have become more popular than Senior (288 positions).

*Where the employer did not indicate in the title the required level of experience, we used the following distribution by year: Junior – up to 3 years of experience; Middle – 3-5 years of experience; Senior – 5+ years of experience. In the case when neither the level of experience nor the number of years of experience was indicated, the vacancy was not reflected in the diagram. 

Distribution of vacancies by experience levels and cities

Consolidated data on the professional level, time, and city are given below.

Top 9 companies with the largest number of vacancies in the first half of 2021

We also continue to analyze the companies that are most often looking for specialists in the field of Data Science. As before, the leaders in the number of vacancies are large service companies that have different projects and many customers. Data Science UA remains the absolute leader, which helps other companies to hire specialists in the field. Compared to 2020, DataArt was ahead of Ciklum and became the second in the number of vacancies, and Global Logic and SoftServe were ahead of Luxoft.

We counted the number of companies that posted from 3 vacancies in the direction of DS, from October 2020 to June 2021 inclusive (a total of 132 companies), and evaluated these companies by field of activity (product / outsourcing)

As for product companies, their distribution by cities is as follows:

* Companies that have offices in several cities are included in each of them

Conclusion

In the first half of 2021, as in 2020, the largest number of vacancies (among the above-mentioned cities and regardless of the level of experience) is available in Kyiv, but Lviv is ahead of Kharkiv, while Odesa and Dnipro have almost the same number of offers.

Vacancies for candidates without experience or with minimal work experience (up to one year) are critically low (51 vacancies in total). The most such offers in Kyiv (26), the least in Odesa (2):

The collected data shows that as in 2020, in the first half of 2021, there is a high demand for data scientists, data engineers, and data analysts. As in 2020, the demand for product analyst specialists remains similar (there were 17 such vacancies in the first half of 2021), and there is also a new demand for data architects (16 vacancies).