Tech recruiter shares insights and advice for IT pros with Hadoop skills trying to land a brand new gig.

When you’re hot, you’re hot, and the open-source Apache Hadoop project have been scorching for ages. That’s excellent news for IT job hunters with serious Hadoop chops and related skills.

Demand for those skills has pointed skyward for the past several years, in line with Matt Andrieux, lead technical recruiter at Riviera Partners inside the San Francisco Bay Area. “Our portfolio companies, that are mostly startups, are searhing for a variety of engineers which may help them leverage data in various ways in which might be useful their base line,” Andrieux said in an email interview. “Many companies are basing their entire business off of information collection and analysis, which are useful for any industry.”

Andrieux noted that it is not Hadoop itself that’s actually fueling the boom; rather, rising demand for Hadoop and similar skills is a byproduct of the big sums of information we’re generating today.

“The hype is absolutely being driven by the large explosion of unstructured data created by human and machine activity on the web,” Andrieux said. “There’s value on this unstructured data, but it’s nearly impossible to brush through all of it with past indexing technologies like SQL. Hadoop and similar tools within the big data ecosystem provide engineers the power to create structured data from unstructured data and derive valuable business insight on a massively distributed scale.”

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Experience with big data tools identical to Hadoop, including Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, and more, is also in high demand, according Andrieux.

We asked Andrieux to assist dig past the hype for insights into the present job marketplace for IT pros with Hadoop and related expertise.

1. Sorry, greenhorns — experience matters.
Asked what his clients traditionally demand when on the lookout for IT pros with Hadoop skills, Andrieux replied, “The more experience the easier.” Sorry, newbies. Chances are you’ll find choppier seas when looking to land a coveted data gig — though there are certainly how one can build experience. (More on that during a moment.)

If you have got the requisite experience, then again, flaunt it as appropriate.

“Our startup clientele are trying to find engineers who can come right into a production environment and hit the floor running,” Andrieux said. “Exposure to it’s not enough, but engineers who’ve hands-on implementation in large-scale environments are preferred.”

2. Here’s the way to build experience.
For younger IT pros or experienced ones seeking to add new skills, Andrieux recommended two paths: professional training and certifications, and becoming concerned in local industry meetups.

“For somebody trying to break into and learn Hadoop, i’d suggest facing professional Hadoop training and certifications that businesses like Cloudera and Hortonworks offer,” Andrieux advised. “These trainings give engineers real-world experience and are often conducted by experts within the field.”

Local industry organizations offer another sort of education in addition to significant networking opportunities. “Various meetup groups around the

Kevin Casey is a writer based in North Carolina who writes about technology for small and mid-size businesses. View Full Bio

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