Even as the fear of losing jobs to robots in the technology-driven world is worrying the skilled workers, only 20 per cent of the workforce in Asia-Pacific region is data literate and interestingly, India leads the pack at 45 per cent. India is ahead of countries such as Australia, Singapore, China and Japan in that order.

Qlik Analytics, a leader in data analytics, in a survey APAC Data Literacy Survey, said that out of over 5,000 full-time employees surveyed, only one-in-five (20 per cent) employees feel confident in their data literacy skills, which means they have the ability to read, work with, analyse and argue with data, despite growing pressure to use data within the workplace.

“With more data being created today than ever before, data literacy has now become as important as the ability to read and write. It adds weight to our arguments and helps us make better decisions. It is no wonder then that almost nine in ten of data literates say they are performing very well at work, compared to one in three of those that are not data literate,” said Paul Mclean, Data Literacy Evangelist, APAC at Qlik.

The survey revealed an escalating skills gap and troubling lack of enablement by employers is preventing those in the workforce from making strategic, data-driven decision. This also means that people who are not data literate will find it challenging to make themselves relevant in the workforce.

However, the survey also said that about 71 per cent of the APAC workers use data once a week (or more) in their current job roles and two thirds (66 per cent) said that they have to work with a higher volume of data today compared to three years ago.

The survey was conducted by Censuswide on behalf of Qlik by taking responses from 5,288 full-time workers across Australia, Singapore, India, China and Japan, between January 30 and February 14 this year.

Importance of data

While about 90 per cent workers acknowledged the importance of data, about 72 per cent of full-time workers said they are willing to invest more time and energy in improving their data literacy skills, if given the chance.

“We can see a clear gap across APAC whereby business leaders are demanding that their employees leverage data day-to- day to drive actionable insights. At the same time however, there is a noticeable gap in the level of support provided to empower them,” Mclean said, adding that India is leading the way with the most data literates at 45 per cent as against the regional average of 20 per cent.

In the last two years, the demand for data-related courses have increased substantially and several start-ups such as Acadguild, TalentSprint, Simplilearn, Udemy and Coursera are trying to help the current workforce and the freshers, especially in the IT sector, become data literate.

According to Teamlease, a recruitment and HR firm, the Indian IT industry is expected to add around 1.80-2 lakh jobs this year.