You might want to point your OM students (who typically want to major in Accounting, Finance, or Marketing) to a fascinating USA Today (Jan. 24, 2017) article on the “50 Best Jobs in America.” Jobs that require a range of STEM skills (science, technology, engineering and math) claimed 14 spots in Glassdoor’s new survey. This includes the top-seeded position: data scientist, a job in which employs math and computer programming skills to wrestle huge amounts of raw data into intelligible and useful data sets. That job took the crown with a leading Glassdoor score that reflected the number of openings for the position (currently 4,184), a top company satisfaction rating (reflective of culture and values) and a healthy median base salary ($110,000).
Here are some others that share skills we teach in operations management:
#2 DevOps Engineer (2725 openings, $110,000 salary); #3 Data Engineer (2599, $106,000); #5 Analytics Manager (1958, $112,000); #7 Data Base Administrator (2977, $93,000); #18 Supply Chain Manager (1270, $100,000); #22 Quality Control Manager (2531, $92,000); #42 Operations Manager (1009, $93,000); #45 Supplier Quality Manager (862, $80,000); #50 Construction Project Manager (1944, $85,000).
The proliferation of technology-related jobs is due to those skills now being needed at businesses that don’t consider themselves traditional tech companies. These days, almost every company is in some way a tech company, requiring workers who are able to create and maintain a firm’s technological infrastructure. “Any company with data today is trying to get these people,” says Glassdoor’s chief economist. “The problem in filling these positions is that generally employees’ skills have not kept up with the demand.”
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