Web skills in demand

Digital Marketing and Web skills in demand

The vast majority of our readership work in and around the analytics/marketing/web creation industries. Have you made a great career choice? Demand that grows ahead of supply may be good for your career prospects but not so good for employers needing to hire people with knowledge and experience – a classic skills shortage that threatens to curtail growth and push up costs.

Are these sectors firmly on an upward path?  I recently took the opportunity to “spot check” a colleague’s assertion that these markets for suitably qualified and motivated professionals were not only growing, but still in early stages of expansion with lots more to come. It seemed like a reasonable assumption however I wondered just how this was playing out in the “real world” of jobs – actual advertised vacancies.

Using the Trends tool from job search aggregator indeed.com  I researched a number of job titles (you can use their tool to map your own specific job title or skillset).  The tool worked out the % of matching postings (as a proportion of the total advertised job market) for the key words that I specified.

I ran a number of graphs for various titles (both within and outwith the industry) to cross check my thinking and below are 5 of the them. “Web Designer”, “Web Developer” “Digital Marketing” “Analytics” and “Accountant” … Why “Accountant” ? … because it gives us a comparative for a job title that we know (and love!) and which sits outside of the internet and digital marketing space.

The results certainly show rapid growth in the use of the “digital marketing” phrase and this growth over six years is even more impressive when compared to the “accountant” trend. 

Web Designers and Web Developers have followed broadly similar trends to each other although the short term cycles within the Designer trend are more pronounced. It is interesting that both have suffered a bit of downtrend through 2012.

The term Analytics features more times than Accountant. (Although “Analytics” will not always refer to Internet/Web  Analytic jobs, an analysis of current adverts would indicate that it does in most cases.)

The 6 year trends for these internet/digital job terms still look strong in comparison to the wider market despite coming off their peak during this year. A growing labor supply is needed to avoid skills shortages and although increasing education and training in these disciplines will help – hard earned experience is always going to be more difficult to source.

Cross checking trends is best done regularly and by using a variety of independent tools – if you have any research or thoughts in this area we would be interested in your comments.