Are social media strategists and website designers about to go the way of the dodo bird? Research released by Bentley University says that may be the case.
The university, which has long specialized in business degrees at all levels, commissioned a study to analyze job categories and see what the trends were in the requirements for these categories. Two stood out as having changed dramatically: human resources and IT.
The study, executed by the analytics firm Burning Glass, "found job descriptions are expanding to include skills that used to represent standalone jobs, threatening to altogether eliminate positions such as the social media strategist or web designer."
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As an example of morphing corporate roles, the researchers said that job postings for social media experts as a standalone position have fallen 64 percent over the last five years. Meantime, "the skill of social media strategy has risen sharply in human resource jobs (up 376 percent), sales jobs (up 150 percent), and marketing and PR jobs (up 117 percent)."
So social media is far from dead. The standalone job is simply now a dead end.
The same is happening with web design, where companies now expect somebody else to take it on as part of their workload. While not as dramatic as the decline in social media postings, the trend cited by the study is to no longer delegate web design to a single employee.
"Job postings for web designers have fallen 8 percent, even as the skill of web design has risen 11 percent in marketing/PR job listings and 9 percent in graphic design job listings."
A larger decline was spotted in business development, where marketing and IT types are now expected to manage that task.
Other survey findings:
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The top three skills needed across multiple job categories include: business development (9), Oracle (9), and mathematics (8).
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Hybrid jobs that add new skills to traditional job descriptions – for example, marketing jobs that require knowledge of SQL or SAP – pay more than the same jobs without those new skills.
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In IT, openings for "big data" jobs have grown 3,977 percent since 2011 and the average salary for these job openings is $123,057.
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Where you live affects how much you earn. Data scientist jobs in the western U.S. offer $134,619 on average, compared to $101,372 in the southwest. Cybersecurity analyst jobs in New England offer $108,522, compared to $88,298 in the plains states of the midwest.
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
