But in its latest report released today, the IAPA warns that those in mid-tier roles will need to boost their soft skills to increase salaries.

According to Jodie Sangster, chief executive of IAPA, “While many more organisations now have an analytics team, it is soft skills, like communication, influencing and advocacy, that will ensure the business can take action on analytics driven insights.  These are the essential skills for analytics professionals in 2018.”

“Adding these soft skills to your analytics team is a business imperative for any analytics leader as it directly impacts the perceived success of analytics across the organisation – and the ability to act on insights.”

To this end, Sangster says that IAPA has introduced a Business Interaction for Analysts course to help analytics professionals gain and improve their soft skills. The course provides a career boost for those in data and analytics and covers communication, persuasion, influencing and skills to improve interactions with the rest of the business.

According to the IAPA, the “soft skills based data story-telling” trend has also been observed by industry leaders, such as report sponsor Yellowfin.

Glen Rabie, chief executive at Yellowfin, said: “Rather than demonstrating coding or numerical expertise, chief data officers and chief analytics officers are being asked to demonstrate a range of skills and experience, including the ability to communicate the story behind the analytics.”

Key themes from the IAPA report include:

1.     Expert and entry–level salaries are accelerating

The top 10% report a salary increase of 7% to a median of $235,000 and the bottom 5% an increase of 9% to $72,000 annually.
 
2.     Gender pay gap in analytics is half the Australian average

The pay gap between men and women in 2017 improved slightly to 8%; almost half of the Australian job market pay gap of 15.3%.
 
3.     Soft skills will get you the job

A candidate that has a good breadth of soft skills, including communication, presentation and business leadership will be more employable than one with only a range of technical skills.
 
4.     Team managers and technical experts get top dollar

To earn more, manage a team or uplift your skills in big data technologies or advanced analytical techniques.
 
5.     Disruption is common but is disconnecting sectors

AI has arrived, but there’s a disconnect between the readiness of businesses on the vendor side (now) and within industry (still in 2-3 years).
 
6.     Make time to build innovation

Time for innovation is the biggest challenge for analytics professionals. If a more disciplined approach to innovation isn’t implemented, analytics teams run the risk of becoming all about servicing business demands, and organisations will struggle to get the competitive advantage that analytics provides.

IAPA says employers now expect at least three soft skills and five technical skills for the median analytics professional salary of $130,000 – and to increase the value to the organisation, and increase salary, team management skills (including soft skills) or more specialised technical skills are required.

The survey reported team managers earn a median salary of $163,000, which is $33,000 above the median, and top dollar is paid for more bespoke technical skills like natural language processing, social network analysis and optimisation as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, big data and text mining.

To access the IAPA report click here.