Want a job where the talent is scarce — and likely to remain that way for at least the next five years? Become a data scientist. That, at least, is the conclusion of a global survey of the number-crunching professionals by IT service company EMC.

Some 63% of data scientists say the profession is going to be undermanned for the foreseeable future — and half of those see it as a serious shortage. In particular, the explosive growth of sensors — the so-called "physical Internet" — will provide organizations with an unprecedented wealth of data.

But not all of them will have the capacity to turn that raw data into anything useful. Only 1/3 of respondents in the study were very confident in their company's ability to make business decisions based on new data.

"Data is the new oil," says Andreas Weigend, Head of the Social Data Lab at Stanford and the former Chief Scientist at Amazon, in a statement. "Unfortunately, the technology has evolved faster than the workforce skills to make sense of it, and organizations across sectors must adapt to this new reality or perish."

Check out the rest of the survey data in the detailed inforgraphic below — and let us know in the comments if this is a career you'd like to pursue.