Looking for a Job in Web Analytics?

Looking for a new career? Have you ever considered looking into the field of Web Analytics? This is an exciting and relatively new field that is quickly growing. Before you decide to pursue a career this field, you may want to read this. In Web Analytics 2.0, Avinash Kaushik states that “prospective analysts don’t recognize the two critical choices they must make”.  He says that that a prospective analyst must choose one from each of the following choices:

Choice 1: Technical or business analytics

Choice 2: Individual or team leader

He then challenges us to ask ourselves four questions in considering a job within this field. These questions include:

1. Do you like being an individual contributor?

2. Do you like managing people?

3. Do you love “code” and think there’s nothing better than parsing scripts to make magic happen?

4. Do you love being in strategy meetings?

In answering these questions, one must be honest and self-aware in order to determine if this is the field for you and what career path you would be most successful in. There will be a dramatic difference in career paths depending on how these questions are answered. Ultimately, there are currently four outcomes or career paths an analyst can take. Mr. Kaushik provides us with a job description, career prospects, salary, and promotional opportunities for each. They are summarized below:

1. Technical Individual Contributor

-Roles include:  Senior Project Manager, Senior Architect.

-Career prospects: Good for large to extra large companies, difficult to find roles in medium to large companies.

-Salary: salary starts around $40,000, may reach up to $100,000 for top contributors.

-Promotion prospects: Opportunities for promotions are not good unless one is willing to move towards business analytics and intelligence roles in IT.

2. Business Individual Contributor

-Roles include: Senior Analyst, Internal Evangelist, and Central Business Liaison.

- Career prospects: Very good

-Salary: $70,000 to $120,000

-Promotion prospects: Very good as experience allows one in this role flexible to take on other types of positions.

3. Technical Team Leader

-Roles include: Manager of Analytics Implementation, Senior Manager of Website Analytics, or Group Manager of Web Operations Reporting

-Career Prospects: Fair, limited by size of company.

-Salary: $50,000 to $100,000

-Promotion Prospects: Limited

4. Business Team Leader

-Roles include: Senior Manager of Website Analytics, Director of Web Research and Analytics.

-Career prospects: Very good

-Salary: range from $90,000 to $170,000

-Promotion prospects: Depends by company, but no limit if you excel in this role.

If you’re ready to pursue any of these positions, the first step may be to fulfill the educational requirement. In the “Career Guidance for Digital Analytics Professionals” produced by the Digital Analytics Association, it is stated that “educational requirements vary greatly by company or hiring manager”. They proceed to say that “a candidate with a graduate degree (for example, a Masters or MBA), or a degree in a discipline such as mathematics, statistics, economics, finance, marketing or technology will certainly be at an advantage when looking for opportunities”.

Sources

http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/resource/resmgr/PDF_education/DAA_Career_Guidance_for_Digi.pdf, Accessed on January 15, 2013.

Kaushik, Avinash (2010). Web Analytics 2.0. Indiana: Wiley Publishing Co. 3.