How's the market?

If there's one question that we're asked the most often, it's this one: "How's the market?"

And when it comes to ECM technologies, employment opportunities for ECM professionals, and hiring options for employers who have ECM jobs to fill, it's probably fair to say that we're a pretty good thermometer.

We're not bad at forecasting either.

We've been saying, for quite a long time (early 2007), that Documentum (and Documentum-related jobs) is on the decline and that Sharepoint and Alfresco are gaining market-share quickly.

Some of our fellow bloggers, and even a few analysts, have told us to hold-our-horses (just a polite way of saying WRONG), but we continue to report what our client companies tell us. And now, more than three years later, we have the data needed to support our forecast. (Graphs provided using the data and tools supplied by job aggregator Indeed.com)

    

The implications of such big shifts (note that Documentum jobs are in mostly negative growth since Q3 2007) are different for different organizations and different kinds of people; they spell opportunity for some and danger for others. The good news for all is that IT spending is up again which means that projects are being created, funded and staffed. The question is how do you leverage your specific experience and expertise in this specific climate. That's the subject for another post.

If you have questions about leveraging your specific skill set, let us now. We'll aggregate the questions and answer them without using individual names. You can leave the question in comments or e-mail Virginia@BrilliantLeap.com

Comments

[Lee Smith]

Those graphs are pretty meaningless without more explanation and a lot more context. Having said that it doesn't take a genius to say that the jobs market has grown in Alfresco and SharePoint since 2006 - the products are new entrants and maturing.

Plus this is a very narrow view of the ECM world, where are OT and IBM and Oracle?

[Virginia]

Hi Lee,

These graphs display relative growth for jobs matching the assigned search term(i.e. "Documentum","Sharepoint","Alfresco")

I'll post graphs for IBM ECM, Oracle UCM and OpenText early next week. Job growth hangs well above the "0" line most of the time for those technologies. The same holds true for SAP, by the way, which is also a legacy system.

My point, to an extent, was to show workers where demand is growing and where it is not. Documentum professionals who have their careers deeply invested in the technology might find this especially troubling because the supply of Documentum workers continues to grow while the demand for them does not.(This is because outsourcing companies keep training them.)

In contrast, my Alfresco customers seldom even list Alfreco as a "must have" job requirement; they know that there aren't enough skilled profesionals to go around. This is similar to how my Documentum customers hired in the mid- 1990's. If you were smart and knew VB and ColdFusion (Documentum wasn't always JAVA based) they'd teach you Documentum.

This is turning into another post, I'll save the rest for later.