how come this becomes an ad thread.

anyway, I will share my experience in this area so far.

relatively quite a lot data scientist openings now. however, I'd say probably more than half are government sponsored - EDB or some other agency co-fund large organisations to establish "analytics" or "innovation" or "digital" or "data xxx" lab here, in an effort to develop a data-driven economy which is part of the whole Smart Nation plan. many company also invest in this field mainly because everybody else is doing it and wants to grab some talent first.

personally I feel there hasn't been many real impactful projects done or showcased yet in this field, in other words it is still over-hyped. many of those positions for data scientist, the employer actually don't have much clear idea of what real benefit they can rely on data analytics yet.

the competition for analytics jobs are actually quite intense, at least for mid-senior level. this is a field of low entry bar, but difficult to progress further without working on realistic project, and combine with domain knowledge of the specific industry. for someone with some college level math and programming knowledge, one can reach a level of 2-3 out of 10 by just learning from those free tutorials and courses from internet. But maximum one probably can only reach 4-5 if only depend on those resources. even kaggle's competition won't help much as all challenges there are well defined scoped down problems (but still a good place to learn different techniques). a lot of time the real world problems are much more complex and there's also a trade-off between technology optimality and business constraints, not to mention the engineering constraints such as streaming feasibility and scalability.

The pay isn't that fancy either. after all SG is not silicon valley, many industry still very old schooled and won't be adopting this kind of technology as swiftly.