This shortage of people with data science skills is smaller, but growing faster, than the national shortage of software development skills (which includes programming languages, like C++ and Java). Today there’s a shortage of 212,838 people with software development skills. But 3 years ago, software development skills were already in shortage nationally—so the “intensification” of the shortage for data science is actually larger than that for software development.

There are still cities in the U.S. today with surpluses of data science skills, where an employer could potentially find and recruit from untapped talent pools, but they are few and far between. The ten biggest cities with data science skills surpluses are Cleveland-Akron (1,206 people), Minneapolis (832 people), Cincinnati (770 people), Greensboro-Winston Salem (601 people), Kansas City (521 people), Milwaukee (430 people), Memphis (331 people ), Dayton (323 people), Birmingham (308 people), and Louisville (247 people). But these surpluses are all relatively small and narrowing rapidly. There is a big opportunity for people who are interested in data science to learn new skills and successfully find a job in this in-demand field.

(Note: This month we updated the skills gap methodology in the LinkedIn Workforce Report to include absolute headcounts to precisely measure skills gaps. To learn more about this updated methodology, see here.)

A skills gap is the gap between supply and demand for a specific skill, in a specific local labor market, at a specific point in time. That means that skills gaps are fundamentally local, and specific to the supply and demand of individual skills within a labor market. The U.S. cities with the largest skills gaps overall are New York City, San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles.