Tutorial: Exploring Analytics & Data Science Salary Data

Every year, the Ask a Manager blog does a salary survey and shares the raw data with anyone who wants to view it.

I decided to explore the data from the 2023 survey to see what I could learn about Analytics & Data Science salaries, and also how the industry compares to other jobs.

Some of the questions I wanted to answer:

• What were the average salaries of the most common data-related jobs?
• How does the data industry compare to other jobs overall?

The survey goes live in April, and I downloaded the data in August. There were 16,888 submissions at the time of my download. After doing minimal data cleaning (convert to lowercase, remove any leading or trailing spaces, and replace “sr” and “sr.” with “senior), there were 8,739 unique job titles.

Data Biases

Before I share my insights, a little disclaimer. I know the data from this survey is not a perfect representation of all jobs. It is likely going to skew towards people working in white-collar jobs, and as you’ll see below, women are over 75% of the responses.