Indeed’s job trend tool is one of my favorite tools for finding a niche or learning about new industries on the rise. For example, have a look at how much ‘inbound’ job postings increased from December 2014 to March 2016, only to dip again over the next three months.
What’s also interesting is how different companies label their support or experience teams, and this tool can be one of the best place to look. What’s the difference between a happiness engineer vs. a more classic customer support representative? Who’s being hired more? Which role titles are becoming more popular? Lets dive into the data.
Query 1:
Customer Support vs. Customer Service vs. Customer Success vs. Customer Happiness
Clearly old-fashioned ‘customer service’ is the most common way to title customer service job postings. ‘Customer happiness’ though often used across social media accounts, actually isn’t that common with job postings. What’s also interesting is this:
Query 2:
Customer Support vs. Customer Service
As a percentage, ‘customer support’ job postings — absolute value of 12% of postings to 8% of postings-are going down faster than ‘customer service’ job postings-absolute value of 22% of postings to 18% of job postings.
Query 3:
Success Engineering vs Happiness Engineering
Once again, ‘happiness’ doesn’t appear in job titles, and success engineering as a job title is actually on the decline.
Query 4:
Happiness Engineering on Its Own
Never fear, ‘Happiness Engineering’ is actually on the rise, its just relatively super small compared to existing job titles.
Query 5:
Customer Service Manager vs. Marketing Manager vs. Social Media Manager
How does customer service jobs stack up vs other common jobs in the broader customer experience field? Here you can see ‘customer service manager’ jobs being 2x more common than marketing manager job postings, and 15x more common than social media manager job postings still.
Query 6
Community Managers vs. Community Specialist vs. Community Coordinator
Community manager, specialist and coordinator jobs are some of the most steady and growing titles related to customer experience. Interestingly, ‘manager’ titles in community management aren’t growing as fast as ‘specialist’ and ‘coordinator’ titles.
Query 7
How Good is This Data? Are Support Jobs on a Downward Trend More Generally?
According to this data, it looks like Indeed’s seeing a slight and steady drop in postings overall. Here I queried trends in jobs with incredibly common words like ‘marketing’, ‘manager’, ‘developer’, and designer’. All four of these words are decreasing in terms of appearing in job postings over time, so I don’t think customer support jobs, however you want to label them, are decreasing any faster than jobs more generally.
In terms of job growth more generally, I’ll let the experts talk about that one :)
