The Sexiest Job In The 21st Century Is …

Hint: It’s not a Zumba instructor in Maine.

The sexiest job of the new millenium happens to be the “data scientist,” at least according to the eggheads at the Harvard Business Review. The HBR cites as an example a physics PhD who helped LinkedIn become a huge success by developing the breakthrough “people you may know” application.

Data scientists are apparently in great demand by companies who are trying to get their arms around huge amounts of digital information.

What exactly is a data scientist? The HBR explains that it is someone highly skilled in data mining, a professional who can manage and find insights in data:

“It’s a high-ranking professional with the training and curiosity to make discoveries in the world of big data. The title has been around for only a few years … But thousands of data scientists are already working at both start-ups and well-established companies. Their sudden appearance on the business scene reflects the fact that companies are now wrestling with information that comes in varieties and volumes never encountered before. If your organization stores multiple petabytes of data, if the information most critical to your business resides in forms other than rows and columns of numbers, or if answering your biggest question would involve a ‘mashup’ of several analytical efforts, you’ve got a big data opportunity.”

At the moment, no university offers a degree in data science, but although perhaps an article published in a prestigious journal like this one could get things moving in that direction.

If you are considering a career path in technology or otherwise, here are some disciplines that you probably should avoid. As The Inquisitr has previously reported, the most worthless college majors in terms of getting a job are fine arts, drama and theater arts, commercial art/graphic design, architecture, philosophy/religion, English, journalism, anthropology/archeology, and hospitality management. With the glut of attorneys, you can also add going to law school to the list.

The good news: The most versatile college degrees reportedly are business administration, accounting, computer science (which — who knows — could eventually qualify you as a data scientist), psychology, and criminal justice.

If you are new to the workforce, are you optimistic about obtaining or keeping a job in your chosen field? Do you think data scientists are sexy?