Professionals with big data and machine learning skills get paid the best salaries in Mumbai

It is not the Silicon Valley of India that pays best to IT professionals but technology companies in the financial capital that are paying fat salaries to those armed with big data and machine learning skills, a new report said on Wednesday. “Machine learning is the better paying skill in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai (in that order) whereas Big Data takes the top spot in Delhi, Pune and Kolkata,” said the report by online school for analytics Jigsaw Academy and Analytics Vidhya, a data science community. Mumbai also pays the highest to analytics and big data professionals, followed by Bengaluru and Delhi. “Mumbai also has the stronghold when it comes to pay for entry-level analytics professionals. Delhi manages to beat Bengaluru when it comes to paying freshers with analysts in Delhi being paid 4.5 per cent over their Bengaluru counterparts,” the report added. The changing nature of the tech industry is being reflected in the hiring practices of companies. “We have long talked about moving up the value chain in terms of the services we offer to the world. We now have a chance to become the intelligence hub for the world. The IT industry can transform itself into IT 2.0 by riding on the big data wave,” Gaurav Vohra, CEO and Co-founder of Jigsaw Academy, said in a statement. Open source tools combined with machine learning techniques have become the focus of the industry and top tools like “R” and “Python” can help professionals get into data analytics and get paid well. The report said that the bet on machine learning is paying off and professionals can get an average pay of Rs 10.43 lakh per annum while professionals with the knowledge of Big Data can get an average pay of Rs 9.93 lakh per annum. “However, what companies seem to cherish are professionals with both these skill sets, a combination which fetches Rs 13.94 lakh per annum on an average,” the report noted. “Open source tools combined with machine learning techniques have become the focus of the industry. It is evident from the report that companies prefer people who embrace the open source ecosystem and have high agility to learn new tools and techniques,” Kunal Jain, Founder and CEO of Analytics Vidhya, added.