Demand for R jobs on the rise, while SAS jobs decline

Job-tracking site indeed.com shows the rate at which certain terms appear in job advertisements. As you can see from the chart below, demand for R language skills is on the rise, while the number of SAS-related job postings peaked in late 2010 and has been declining steadily since early 2012. 

I included the word "statistics" in the search to filter out any job ads that mentioned "SAS" or "R" but weren't related to data analysis. Just for kicks, here's the same chart with "SPSS statistics" and "Cobol" also included:

The searches above were performed today; click on the charts to get an up-to-date search. You can try your own search terms at Indeed Job Trends.

Comments

[Josue]

For stat & research, Use R!!

[zolin]

Can this be now? I am looking for jobs, all they ask is "do you know SAS?" I don't see one thing that SAS is better than R. So, hurry and dominate the market please!

[Wei Chen]

I thinkall you can say is that R+statistcs jobs are more on Indeed.com. I see many jobs with SAS more than R for now.You need include "SAS programmers" as search for programmers who work in pharma company and analyze data and drug trials. R is great for research but many comapanies use for SAS for data cleaning, merging, and aggregating and don't want R for that.

[Bob Muenchen]

Hi David,

Thanks for this great post. I've gone through contortions trying to collect this data on my own so this tool will save me a bunch of time! Here's what I've done with it so far:
http://bit.ly/Stats-Jobs

Cheers,
Bob Muenchen

[BA]

You get a somewhat different picture if you try:
R analytics, SAS analytics
or
R predictive, SAS predictive

[Douglas Rowe]

Search results from one job-search website are insufficient to confirm a decline in SAS-related jobs, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, a decline in SAS jobs could result from reduced Federal and state government spending.