For many the current economic climate is making for a gloomy employment market, it truly isn't the best time to be looking for a new job. Unless you work in tech of course, and especially if you're a Community Manager.
ReadWriteWeb are reporting today showing which parts of the tech industry are recruiting, taking data from their JobWire service for November and the first two weeks of December. Overall they are seeing Marketing firms doing a lot of hiring, in fact more so than any other department with 31 out of the 235 jobs advertised on ReadWriteWeb's JobWire. Social networking firms are also hiring actively, suggesting that although many analysts are unsure how these firms are going to monetise, they are still bullish.
However, the most interesting part of the report is to look at which job categories and expertise areas are being hired. As you might expect for the tech industry, developers are the most common hire, but it is the number of community manager and social media roles that is striking. Almost as many online community manager roles were advertised as roles in sales and marketing; almost one in ten of all tech jobs. A real sign that online community managers are hot property at the moment and a growth area for employment and good news for those of us involved in promoting community management.
We posted over the weekend about the importance of the community manager and their role in building and growing an online community. These individuals are critical to the success of any online community or social media project and these hiring statistics prove that more and more. We're seeing the professionalisation of the online community manager role and it being embedded both in agencies and client-side. I'm not usually in the business of making predictions (unlike many people are at this time of year!) but I suspect 2009 will see this role become more important and more embedded in the organisation - more training, more conferences, more networking (like the Online Community Manager LinkedIn goup) and more meetups (like the one we organised in London last month). This data from ReadWriteWeb helps to underline the growing importance of the role, even in the current economic climate.
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