CRM job market improving |
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By Barney Beal, News Director
29 Nov 2007 | SearchCRM.com |
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Things are looking bright for CRM professionals over the next year, according to a number of recent reports, job boards and industry developments.
Companies looking for people with CRM skills may be in a bind, however. Speaking at the Gartner CRM Summit in September, Scott Nelson, managing vice president with the Stamford, Conn.-based research firm, predicted that through 2008, 25% of CRM projects will be cancelled or postponed because of the skills shortage in consultants and systems integrators. Analytics skills particularly will see a significant skills shortage, and many marketers are unprepared to capitalize on Web 2.0, he added.
That shortage of skills seems to be translating into increased pay for those that have them. According to the latest quarterly IT skills and certification pay index from Foote Partners LLC, a Vero Beach, Fla.-based IT research consultancy, the average pay for noncertified IT skills has topped certification pay for the first time since 2000. According to the research, which monitors 74,000 IT professionals, enterprise business application skills are paying 3.2% higher than six months ago and 11.6% higher than a year ago. Oracle and SAP application skills in particular are "hot skills," according to Foote Partners. The report also identifies management, process and methodology skills as "hot," including project management, CRM, Business Intelligence and ITIL.
In addition, odinjobs.com, a job board search engine for the technology sector, has seen a significant increase in demand for CRM skills, according to Odinjobs CEO Naveen Bala. Odinjobs collects job postings from more than 20,000 corporate websites and compiles the data together. Postings actually reached a high with more than 10,000 postings last November.
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Some key CRM job statistics from the last quarter from odinjobs.com in the United States:
CRM applications consultants with functional/technical roles saw the most postings in the last quarter, with 10,279, followed by business analyst roles at 6,075, and developers at 4,921.
Applications consultants also had the highest average salary at $80,650, followed by business analysts in process, functional roles at $77,090, and CRM developers at $75,030.
The financial services industry had the most demand for CRM jobs last quarter with 5,846 postings, followed by manufacturing at 1,164 and healthcare at 850.
Among states, California led the way in demand for CRM jobs with 12,789 and median salary at $84,670, followed by Texas with 5,541 advertised jobs and average salaries of $80,140, and New York with 4,939 jobs and an average salary of $83,610.
Demand for career development
Sensing a vacuum in career development opportunities for CRM professionals, particularly with Web 2.0 technologies, three industry veterans have launched a website that offers social networking, a career management center and CRM news. myCRMCareer, launched at the Gartner CRM Summit, is the work of Ted Hartley, who has headed up regional consulting divisions at Salesforce.com and BearingPoint, and Bruce Culbert, CEO of iSymmetry, a consulting and recruiting practice. Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light and president of the 56 Group LLC, a CRM consultancy and industry pioneer, is providing content and advice for the site. All three also manage BPT Partners, a CRM training, consulting and research firm.
Less a job board, the site was envisioned as a place for CRM professionals to grow their careers.
"We're extending the certification and education of BPT to the Web 2.0 phenomenon," Hartley said. "This is built for CRM professionals and built by them. At its core, it's focused on developing community, increasing competencies and career opportunities."
Web 2.0 is creating challenges and opportunities in the CRM market and myCRMCareer plans to give CRM pros a place to experiment and experience those technologies with blogs, wikis, podcasts and other social networking tools focused on CRM careers and the CRM market.
"This is a CRM sandbox," Culbert said. "We talk about the social customer and the impact on business. It's hard to find that in our own business. This is an opportunity for us as practitioners to get our hands on something and share content, podcasts and video."
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