The issue of employment remains an ongoing concern in the marketplace, whether for individuals pursuing a job or those seeking to fill a slot with just the right candidate. Multiple sources concur that business intelligence remains a key focus for companies. As an example, according to Computerworld’s 2010 Forecast Survey article, business intelligence was ranked as one of the top 6 skills for IT professionals. An earlier article referencing Computerworld’s 2009 Salary Survey noted the position of business intelligence analyst as one of the higher compensated IT roles reviewed.
According to Foote Partners research released at the end of 2009, economic volatility is still impacting the immediate outlook for IT employment. The firm’s press release specifically highlighted less emphasis on jobs per se and more on companies looking to garner specific skills. The release went on to list business intelligence as one of the hot areas for 2009 and expected that trend to continue in 2010.
Taking a cue from these findings we recently ran a search using ‘business intelligence’ as a key word on Monster.com and discovered over 4,300 U.S. job listings based on a 60-day prior view. While that is only just a snapshot in time, another interesting analysis from ITJobsWatch, which provides a UK-based computing job market perspective, showcases a graph of business intelligence jobs as consistently growing from mid 2006 onwards.
One of the key challenges for employers in addition to finding individuals with strong data architecture skills and experience with specific technologies is that they also need those that have a good understanding of their industry and specific business dimensions. Organizations are looking to harness information for greater insight with which to perform better and differentiate themselves from the competition. Not surprisingly, Information Week specifically highlighted business analytics and predictive analytics as a Top 10 evolving opportunity for global CIOs to address.
Yet what this still leaves unmentioned, and hard to quantify, is the vast amount of positions that span the entire job spectrum that require business intelligence skills as a complementary and growing consideration. In what continues to be an increasingly knowledge-based economy, when will the industry deem business intelligence not as just a specific IT vocation? Going even beyond the elusive ‘business analyst’ moniker, we believe business intelligence is a core activity that most professionals engage in on a daily or near-daily basis. It’s putting the power of technology into context that matters.
