March 31, 2014
by Pankaj Mishra
There is a scramble to find the right big data talent, especially for short-term data projects currently being outsourced to big consulting companies such as Accenture, Deloitte apart from several niche suppliers. According to this McKinsey analysis, the U.S. alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the analysis of big data.
Experfy, a startup bootstrapped out of Harvard Innovation Lab, is launching its talent marketplace for data work today to turn this crisis into an opportunity, similar to how oDesk, Elance and Freelancer did for more generic skills. Founded by Sarabjot Kaur, a digital media entrepreneur and Harpreet Singh, former technology director at Citigroup, Experfy plans to manually screen each and every application from would be big data freelancers before putting them out in the marketplace.
