I was recently watching the Coursera course on Data Science (https://class.coursera.org/datasci-001) by Bill Howe and during it the following quote was shown:
“There will be a shortage of talent necessary for organizations to take advantage of big data. By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.”
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation
The point Bill made was that though McKinsey claims we need 140000-190000 programmers, it also states that we need an order of magnitude more analysts. I guess the question is, does the same ratio exist in ABM and computational modeling? Moreover, I find it interesting that Bill claims his class is for the analysts, but he still has them doing programming. Anyway, just struck me that an ABMer is not always an programmer, but all of them should have experience and education programming.