A QUICK LOOK AT THE MOST POPULAR AND FASTEST GROWING JOBS ON INDEED.COMWHAT ARE THE FASTEST GROWING JOBS BY CATEGORYWHAT JOB CATEGORIES HAVE OF LARGEST SHARE OF JOB MATCHESWHAT ARE SOME POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS FOR THESE TRENDS WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.

THE TOP CATEGORIES BASED ON % MATCHING JOB POSTINGS - OVERALLLooking at the Indeed.com website, there are five categories that take the lion’s share as a percentage of matching job postings. They are business, customer, insurance, quality and training. Insurance seems to be the only category that grew ever so slightly over the 4 year period.

THE TOP SUBCATEGORIES BASED ON % MATCHING JOB POSTINGSLooking at hundreds of job categories, there appears a common theme, namely training management, customer service, customer experience, business opportunity and business management. I removed the categories insurance and quality from the this list, because these sub-categories had a lower percentage of matching job postings. Except for training, the remaining categories have a strong link with ecommerce activities. Unless, more customer service reps are being trained, thereby explaining the increase in training category overall.

THE TOP CATEGORIES SALARY TRENDSLooking at the five most popular categories, for the most part, the salaries have not kept pace with the rise in demand in some instances. Business management has seen a salary increase, whereas the other four categories have seen declines. One possible explanation is the skillset has been reduced to pick, pack and ship. A salesperson that might sell office furniture or a new appliance for a sizeable commission is removed from the marketplace and replaced with an online shopping site and a low paid warehouse worker. As a result, the margins are squeezed and also salaries.

THE FASTEST GROWING JOBS ARE IN THE TRANSPORTATION CATEGORYThere appears to be a correlation between the rapid rise in ecommerce and the need for drivers to pick, pack and ship products to consumers.

The fastest growing job categories are driver, truck driver, freight and cdl driver are the fastest growing job categories. All of these categories relate to the transportation industry. Fleet is another category that could be added to the list with a slightly lower growth rate than the freight category.

GROWTH OF ECOMMERCE SINCE 2011The growth in transportation jobs correlates with the rise in ecommerce activity. As you can see from the chart, there is a steady growth since 2011.

Source: Internet Retailer analysis of U.S. Commerce Department figures, which factors out the sale of items not normally bought online like fuel, automobiles and sales at restaurants.

U.S. E-commerce share of total retail sales by quarter

GROWTH OF ECOMMERCE SINCE 2014The Wall Street Journal adds further weight to the previous slide showing the growth in online purchases as well how purchases are made and the demographics.

Source: Wall Street Journal, contributor: Paul Ziobro Writer: Laura Stevens, Published June 8, 2016 12:03 a.m. ET

Survey Shows Rapid Growth in Online ShoppingSurveyed shoppers made 51% of their

purchases on the web

A LOOK AT ECOMMERCE ROLESLooking at the typical job titles for ecommerce. The lowest salary is for social media manager. The highest is ecommerce manager. My assumption is that roles that have a closer relationship with online revenues tend to have greater impact on the business are therefore rewarded with higher salaries. SEO manager is in second place, because of the cost effective impact of search versus other marketing methods used to generate traffic and eventually sales.

A LOOK AT FASTEST GROWING ECOMMERCE ROLESLooking at the typical job titles for ecommerce. Among the twelve job titles list in the previous slide, the jobs titles with the greatest salary increases are Web Analytics Manager, Ecommerce Manager, Web Marketing Manager and Digital Advertising Manager.

SOME QUICK OBSERVATIONSThe rise in ecommerce has boosted the importance of supporting roles in web analytics, SEO, digital advertising and social media. Data science and big data analytics have also grown in tandem with this increase.A lot of these roles pay substantially higher salaries than the sales clerk and commission salesperson they replaced. Unfortunately, a proportionally larger share of jobs left the retail floor and moved into the warehouse. The increased need in drivers correlates with this change.What to do about it?It might be a good idea to re-train some of the sales personnel that lost their jobs and transition them into the fields that are growing faster, such as ecommerce, data science and transportation. The added benefit is that they will likely earn higher incomes over time.

DISCLAIMERS AND ASSUMPTIONS

• The job matching data comes from Indeed.com.• Indeed does not indicate the geographical boundaries of the information. • The national salary trend data ends in Q1 2014, whereas jobs matching data is more

current up to 2016.• Data collected from Indeed.com trends website.• Other sources are Wall Street Journal and Charts & Data.

Author: Yves BourgeoisCopyright 2016