Declining Business Intelligence Jobs in 2009?

For some time now, I have used Monster job searches to gauge demand for Business Intelligence technologies. What I failed to do, however, was keep a good record. Had I done that, I might have been able to spot BI trends. So that became my 2009 New Year’s Resolution: do a consistent monthly BI job search and ponder the results.

Comparing Monster U.S. job postings in February 2009 to the previous month, I see a marked decline for BI keywords. For the standard products (e.g., SAS, Cognos, Business Objects, Reporting Services, etc.), my unscientific study shows 22% fewer job postings (5,923 openings in January and 4,594 in February).

SAS has the biggest demand within BI and it appears to be growing, at least as a percentage of the total BI jobs in the United States. In January, SAS jobs accounted for 20% of the total standard BI jobs and increased to almost 26% in February.

The open source keywords (BIRT, Pentaho, Jaspersoft, and QlikTech) experienced a much bigger decline — 36% — although the small number of job postings for these technologies probably makes the change meaningless (25 and 16 for January and February, respectively).

I also looked for a job posting trend for programming …

For some time now, I have used Monster job searches to gauge demand for Business Intelligence technologies. What I failed to do, however, was keep a good record. Had I done that, I might have been able to spot BI trends. So that became my 2009 New Year’s Resolution: do a consistent monthly BI job search and ponder the results.

Comparing Monster U.S. job postings in February 2009 to the previous month, I see a marked decline for BI keywords. For the standard products (e.g., SAS, Cognos, Business Objects, Reporting Services, etc.), my unscientific study shows 22% fewer job postings (5,923 openings in January and 4,594 in February).

SAS has the biggest demand within BI and it appears to be growing, at least as a percentage of the total BI jobs in the United States. In January, SAS jobs accounted for 20% of the total standard BI jobs and increased to almost 26% in February.

The open source keywords (BIRT, Pentaho, Jaspersoft, and QlikTech) experienced a much bigger decline — 36% — although the small number of job postings for these technologies probably makes the change meaningless (25 and 16 for January and February, respectively).

I also looked for a job posting trend for programming language keywords such as COBOL, RPG, C++, Java, and .NET. While demand for these also declined, the drop was less than that for BI products — down only 6% (13,109 postings in January to 12,308 in February). Within this category, demand for Java far exceeded any other programming language.

Now that I have committed this New Year’s Resolution to you, I will try to keep it up each month (perhaps I should have blogged about a weight loss/exercise plan!).