The IQ Workforce research team has come up with some interesting (useful?) information about retention in the digital measurement community.
We looked at the LinkedIn profiles of 1,470 digital measurement professionals in the U.S. and noted the last time they changed companies. Here is what we found:
| Tenure With Current Employer | Percentage of Digital Measurement Professionals |
| <3 Months | 8% |
| 3-6 Months | 12% |
| 6-12 Months | 31% |
| 12-18 Months | 15% |
| 18-36 Months | 18% |
| 36+ Months | 16% |
… so roughly 51% of the entire digital measurement community has changed jobs within the past year.
This is not good news for the industry. It probably takes the average person 6-9 months to learn their job and 12-15 months to become really valuable to their company. If you add another 2-3 months to fill the position it is not hard to see why a lot of companies are struggling with web analytics. This is a very expensive problem.
Retention initiatives need to move to the front burner if companies are going to get a return on their human capital investments.
Some details about the numbers:
- Tenure numbers are based on LinkedIn profiles. A small percentage of people have changed jobs but have not updated their LinkedIn profiles, so this will impact the accuracy of the data.
- People that are on the cusp were rounded up
- 1,470 profiles were reviewed
- Profiles were all full-time digital measurement professionals in the United States
This is interesting, but what about everyone else? That is, did you look at an average grabbing of, say, folks in account management or product managers, and see what their tenure distribution was? You’d want to compare to see if everyone is changing, or if it’s higher for the measurement professionals.
In addition, is this rate higher than it was in the past? If you had done this same snapshot 6 months ago, would the same distribution show up?
Yes, I agree, they are big numbers… but we need to put them in some kind of context.
I think you need to find out why people have changed jobs. The economy has not been the best recently. I fall into the 6-12 category but I left the company I was with for over 3 years because they went through 3 rounds of layoffs in the past 20 months and did not give out bonuses or merit increases during the 2 year span. How does this sector compare to all linkedin profiles.
I would also try and segment the profiles, specifically agency folks vs client side. From what I have seen people bounce from agency to agency very frequently.
We did not look at everyone else, sorry Michael… and this is the first time we have checked. If you have a few hours free please feel free to look through profiles under a different category and let us know how they stack up.
Thanks for the note Joe. Next time we will segment by industry and – to Michael’s point – show comparisons over time. I would agree that agency people turn over faster. Agencies tend to hire specific skills to cover clients needs… when the client goes away for whatever reason they have no use for the skill set.
Hi Corry,
I am curious how your research team accessed 1,470 profiles in LinkedIn to determine the last time a job change occurred. Does LinkedIn provide an API for this? Also, what job titles comprise the “digital measurement” space?
Thanks for the note Jan. We did a search for several combinations of keywords and titles in our networks. Some of the job titles that we used included phrases such as, “web analyst”, or “digital media analyst, search analyst, etc. We also tried several combinations that include the phrase “web analytics””web analytics manager, “web analytics specialist, director, mobile analytics, social media analytics. After that we substituted the word analytics for words like insights, BI, etc.