The Data Viz community consists of a wide range of people- from novices fresh off their first visualisation projects to seasoned professionals who've been in the field over ten years and counting.
It is a 'young' community with almost the same number of people with under a couple of years into the field as those with over 10 years of experience.
This Visualisation displays the composition of the Data Viz community and tells a story of Data Viz as it changes over a 10 year period.
Responses from people were grouped by the year they started working in Data Viz. The data is seen here as percentages of all these responses.
Most people in the community are self-taught, but a rising trend sees more people picking up the skills in school.
Novices say they need to improve their skills with existing libraries while 7-10 years into the field people say they need to learn new libraries. More specific needs come in across the years.
A significant number of people with 10+ years of XP (11) say they do not need to improve their skills.
Fewer people work in DV as consultants and freelancers.
More people are coming into the field without DV as their primary focus.
Around 2012 there was an increase in people hired for DV specific roles.
People with about 2-3 years of XP seemed to find themselves doing more DV than expected.
More people are being hired as analysts than before. People with more then 10 years of experience have moved into leadership roles.
Designers, developers, engineers, scientists, academics and analysts have a constant distribution across the 10 years.
As expected salaries are seen to increase with years of experience. Poeple entering the field start with about $60k a year while people with 10 years of experience average at abouta $100k.
More recently younger people are not seeing data specialist roles at work. This may be because of the field diversifying or the need for experience before one can take specialist positions. An interesting trend is that specialists are fewer around people with above 7 years of XP.
People 4-5 years into the field work in organisations that have a set list of tools. This group also finds more people working in the private sector than others.
Most audiences seem to use data visualisations weekly, followed by daily and then monthly. Very few people across the years engage their users with quarterly, hourly or yearly data viz.
People with more experience in teh field seem to work in more collaborative environments.
Enthusiasm towards the field is tilted towards newer entrants.
Most members in the community have completed or are in a masters program. This is followed by graduates with bachelors degrees.
Two people had dropped out. One right in the 9th grade!
The largest group of people work in the private sector, followed by academics, public sector, not-for-profits and Journalism.
People in the Data Viz community come from a wide variety of programs. The largest groups of people in the field come from Computer Science, Economics and Psychology.
The visualisation highlights that an increasing number of women entering the field in the last 5 years. The number of people who prefer not to say increases towards the older age group.
Just about 10% of the community identify as LGBTQ.. About half of the rest identify as allies while th e other half do not identify.