With the job market still in churn and available candidates far out-pacing the number of open positions, it make sense to take a step back and evaluate where the job market really is. Is the product owner the new business analyst in an agile environment? Are business analyst position slowly being replaced by project management positions?
A few weeks ago I wrote about the trend I am seeing to combine business analyst responsibilities with other roles. I’ve also been finding many project manager positions where the job descriptions make them seem a lot like business analyst roles under the hood or represent a BA/PM blend.
In my eBook on How to Start a Business Analyst Career, I venture to list a bunch of potential job titles under which you might find a lurking business analyst role. I came up with more than 20 possibilities.
I stumbled across an interesting tool on Indeed this morning and starting exploring some trends in job titles. (Thanks to Twitter user Esther Schindler for posting her own position title graph using this tool.)
Here are some graphs from Indeed (an aggregator of job boards across the web) showing the trends of job titles over the last 4 years. (Apologies in advance for the wonky formatting.)
The business analyst position far outweighs the product owner position when you look at absolute numbers
Product owner roles are growing, while business analysis roles are remaining relatively flat
But when you look at the relative numbers, you can see that “product owner” is growing exponentially while “business analyst” is relatively flat.
Project manager jobs still far outweigh business analyst jobs
Project manager position postings outweigh business analyst postings by over 2:1., though my personal experience indicates that many of these PM positions include BA responsibilities.
Growth in business analyst positions slightly outpaces project manager positions
Interestingly enough the growth trends between the two positions are relatively consistent, though it looks like business analyst positions are growing at a slightly higher rate. And while project manager jobs have fallen below the “zero” line for no growth, BA jobs are, for the time being, not in a negative growth cycle.
And when you look at this chart, something interesting happened in the middle of 2005. Anyone recall what might have triggered such a significant, yet short-lived, spike in business analyst job postings?
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By Laura Brandenburg. Laura Brandenburg is an independent business analyst consultant. She is passionate about the BA profession and is committed to contributing by supporting this blog as a forum for business analysts to build on each other's experiences. View more blog posts by Laura Brandenburg |
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Laura… 2005? What happenned?
Thanks for sharing this.
Your comments on BA/PM roles is good. What’s going on there?
Do you know what happened in July 2005 or are you wondering???
I am wondering. Anyone know?
Ha ha
I think I have posted a comment to th wrong blog
??
I’m pretty sure that the spike in 2005 correlates directly with me putting in my notice at my last job and the employer realizing that I was doing 7 peoples’ jobs. HA!
This is actually a really interesting set of data. I think we talked awhile back about the convergence of roles by title at certain points. The last one that I remember was business analyst/technical analyst merging a couple of years ago. The one before that was about 8-9 years ago when tech writing and online help development merged into business analyst.
We as analysts have to stop being so amenable to these events…we’re enabling the “MAN” to work us to death.
http://continuitycentral.com/july2005.htm Has some business related stories including HP to lose 14,500 workers. A headline of the aftermath of the north american power grid collapse. Sorbanes-Oxley is going to be expensive to implement. Failed terrorist attack in London….
Sounds like a lot of BA’s got hired for self-defense/security issues.