Statically foreign workers might prove to be one answer to the big data skill gap that is growing increasingly noticeable in the U.S today.

The McKinsey Global Institute said that there’s a shortage of 200,000 data scientists in the current job market. That’s a lot of PhDs, and companies will need at least another 1.5 million managers who are “proficient in decision-making based on insights” on top of that to be able to fully leverage their information.

Canada’s national statistics agency recently released a report that points at emerging markets as a potentially rich source of talent. Two thirds of the individuals who have graduated from the Canadian University in 2005 with a doctorate in engineering weren’t native speakers of either English or French, and 60 percent of them were minorities.

There are a few other highlights that Statics Canada published in its report. Four out of 10 graduates in computer science, mathematics, and physical sciences don’t speak any Western languages as their native tongue.

Here’s Murtaza Haider’s reasoning on why the likes of China and India could prove to be big players in this space within the next few years.

“The timing had never been better to undertake such an endeavour on a very large scale. The innovations in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the ready availability of the most advanced analytics software as freeware allows entrepreneurs in developing countries to compete worldwide. The Internet makes it possible to be part of global marketplaces with negligible costs.”

Individuals are not the only ones that are benefiting from this trend – the big money is in the enterprise. Jaspersoft just launched a new connector that allows Google BigQuery customers to use its BI tools with the search giant’s cloud-based columnar analytics engine.