In 2012 IQ Workforce expanded its focus beyond digital and customer analytics to include big data and predictive analytics professionals.
This has been a natural evolution of our recruiting practice. Demand for these skills has skyrocketed among our client base and we have been forced to keep pace. Below are a few charts from Indeed showing the explosive growth of jobs requiring big data and predictive analytics skills.
Relative growth of job postings containing the word “Hadoop”:
It seems pretty clear that demand for Hadoop experience is on the rise. Same thing with the phrase “Data Scientist”:
By contrast, here is the chart for the word Omniture:
You can see that the growth peaked in 2011 and has been up and down since then. The same is true if you look up the phrase “web analytics.”
This is not to say that demand for web analytics skills is declining. On the contrary, the data and our experience both say that they are holding at a pretty strong level. They are simply not growing the way big data and predictive analytics jobs are.
As a recruiting firm you want to try to skate where the puck is going… not where it is at the moment. This has made our lives interesting in 2012. We are now stocking our shelves with professionals from new and different disciplines of analytics, and learning some interesting lessons about these folks as we go.
We are starting conversations and relationships with data scientists, quantitative & statistical analysts and the like because we are betting that 2013 and 2014 are going to be increasingly focused in these areas.
If you are a web analyst and you focus strictly on web analytics at the moment, I would strongly encourage you to diversify your skill set into other types of data.
Companies will always need people that know web analytics, but the intermediate term future is going to be more about creating greater value by:
- Collecting massive amounts of data
- Combining data sets for greater customer insight
- Heavy duty quantitative analysis & modeling of customer, marketing and digital data
I found the SAS chart surprising given how many job descriptions I’ve come across recently that mention SAS. The SAS chart shows what appear to be wider swings than Omniture, a huge spike in early 2010 and then a big drop-off and then a pretty rocky but relatively flat trend from there on out.
Yes, but it is definitely growing and it is 6x as frequent as Omniture.
Thank you for the heads-up, Corry. I’ve had this as a gut feeling for a while now, but you’ve confirmed it, and we’re better off for it.