Managed cloud company Rackspace and Hortonworks (a spin-off of Yahoo!’s development team) are among the vendors supporting a Science to Data Science (S2DS) summer school aimed at converting PhD students in science and math’s into Data Scientists.

The S2DS ‘boot camp’ was created in response to the massive surge in unfilled data scientist posts in the UK, which has increased by 1005% in two years.

From hundreds of applicants, 85 of the most talented PhD students have been selected to take part in S2DS and will be heading to the UK from 24 different countries including Italy, Germany, USA, France and Holland.

The PhDs have a variety of backgrounds including astronomy, physics, maths, computer science and chemistry.

All these disciplines have the analytical skills to make data scientists.

Rackspace’s VP of technology Nigel Beighton said anyone with an analytics background and a PHD has a golden future as a Data Scientist.

“We have first-hand experience of the struggle to find these skills – from our own search for this talent and from what our customers are telling us – and the 1000% increase being reported shows that we are not alone,” Beighton said.

Meanwhile OpenStack vendor Mirantis, is holding a series of three day boot camps which lead to an OpenStack MCA200 professional certification.

The hands-on certification examination is available to any student who has participated in a Mirantis boot camp, or an IT professional who has practical OpenStack experience.

Currently, the examinations are made available the day following the conclusion of a Mirantis three day boot camp.

Mirantis’ head of training Lee Xie said the demand for highly-skilled OpenStack engineers is rapidly growing.

“The cloud market is expected to grow at four times the rate of the overall worldwide IT market,” Xie said.

Rackspace said the courses could attract more women into the IT industry, after it reported that 35% of participating students are female, a figure which is three times the average typically seen in the IT industry.

The S2DS boot camp will culminate in a one-day job fair introducing the students to any companies interested in hiring in this sector.