With half of its population under 25 and the unemployment rate at four-decade high, India faces an uncertain future. The question on young people’s minds: what kinds of jobs will we have? Quartz asked leaders across India’s biggest industries about that one job in their company or field that will be the most crucial in the coming decades.
If the early 2000s were about the transformation of the small screen, the past five years have been about screens getting smaller and content becoming innovative. Netflix’s 2016 launch in India created an unprecedented demand for video-streaming platforms. This also coincided with increasing internet penetration and cheaper data plans. After Netflix, Amazon Prime Video made its foray into India, and was more recently, joined by MUBI. All of these international players face stiff competition from homegrown platforms like Hotstar, Eros Now, Zee5, and Voot. With these innovative platforms, filmmakers have been pushing the envelope for more original content.
Ali Hussein, the CEO of streaming company Eros Now, told Quartz:
The ‘Head of Data Sciences’ position will be one of the more crucial roles for an organization in digital media. The person in this position will have to draw from user behavior (time spent and viewers’ consumption patterns), industry trends, content trends, geographic-specific information, third-party research, and changes in consumer behavior to create the brand’s future strategy. Then, they would collate the data and use it to optimize personalization/recommendation engines, filter actionable data, and gather general business intelligence. Since the business of over-the-top services is in its early days, there isn’t much precedent for this role, which sits between data/research and strategy, so it will be difficult to hire for this role. The best hires are those who have the hunger to learn and want to contribute to a culture that celebrates the success of the team and the brand.