If you’re not aware of some of Indeed’s (www.indeed.com) job trend analysis, you should check it out – it is really interesting. You can search for any word or phrase to see what the trend has been over the last couple of years in terms of the number of online job postings that the term appears in. Indeed is a search engine for online job postings – it searches all of the major and niche job boards as well as the career pages of thousands of companies.
When you search for “Social Media”, you see that almost no online job postings in January of 2006 used that phrase (.0001%) vs. .02% in October of 2007 – 10,000+% growth. This is obviously because the phrase has come more into vogue during that time period but it definitely shows some big-time growth as well. A search for “Web Analytics”, you see that in March of 2002 .02% of all online job postings included the phrase vs. .06% in October of 2007 – 250% growth.I think that analysts from investment banks should start monitoring this – it would be an interesting indicator of how a product is doing in the marketplace if the trend for jobs requiring that product was up or down… Want to see the trend for Omniture vs. Webtrends – what better way than to see the number of companies that are looking for that skill…In fact, why keep it hypothetical – here is the current percentage of job postings with each of the major web analytics packages:
Omniture – .03%
Webtrends – .0025%
Coremetrics – .008%
Hitbox – .005%
Google Analytics – .008%
You probably would have guessed the Omniture would be number one, but would you think that it was more than 10x more common than Webtrends? Not sure if I am ready to draw and conclusions directly from that, but it is interesting if nothing else…
