With companies in practically every industry eager to discover ways to harness the power of big data in their operations, having a background in this area can open doors to a wide range of careers. Operations managers at manufacturing or logistics companies may harness data to improve their demand forecasting, inventory planning, and process efficiency; digital marketers use marketing analytics to better understand their customers and the effectiveness of their messaging; and “quants” at hedge funds rely on data-based financial engineering approaches to move millions of dollars in milliseconds.

Understanding how big data applications are built and what they are capable of can thus be incredibly valuable even if you aren’t a data engineer or data scientist yourself. However, if you have the expertise and desire to work directly with big data yourself, data engineers are responsible for building the data infrastructure capable of reliably and efficiently delivering big data at scale, and data scientists are responsible for using a wide range of analytic and programming approaches to uncover insights from it.

These two roles are in extremely high demand, and command salaries to match. According to Glassdoor, data engineers earn an average annual salary of $102,864, and data scientists earn an average annual salary of $113,309.

Yes - in fact, Coursera is one of the best places to learn about big data. You can take individual courses and Specializations spanning multiple courses on big data, data science, and related topics from top-ranked universities from all over the world, from the University California San Diego to Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Coursera also offers the opportunity to learn from industry leaders in the field like Google Cloud, Cloudera, and IBM, including options to get professional certificates.