SharePoint’s Explosive Job Growth
Guest Author: Wahid Saleemi
http://www.wahidsaleemi.com
I was looking at job trends for a friend the other day and came across this a chart:
I generated it from indeed.com, you can see the live up-to-date information using this link. As you can see, the growth of SharePoint related jobs in the past 5 years has skyrocketed. Meanwhile, technologies such as Lotus Notes and Domino, Oracle WebCenter, IBM WebSphere and others have declined or stayed about the same.
This is an obvious indication that businesses see the value in SharePoint and are deploying it in their organizations. The curve upward in the 2007 time frame tells me that MOSS 2007 was a huge decision driver, with its wide feature set. I believe we’ll see another push upward during this year as SharePoint 2010 expands on features and enriches ones already present in the former version.
Here are two other trends which have caught my attention:
- Self-service BI
- BPM
Self-service Business Intelligence gives end users (rather than IT) all the power in performing analysis to gain insight into their business. Microsoft is leveraging SharePoint and Excel, tools that users are very familiar with, to deliver. I think this will continue to grow, as people don’t want to depend on a business analysts or someone else in IT to build cubes, charts, slicers and analyze their data.
BPM stands for Business Process Management. There are vendors that focus specifically on BPM. I think Microsoft is weak in this area right now but I see them trotting along to provide their perspective on how BPM should be done. BPM uses a combination of technologies to automate business processes. Some are machine-specific (like workflows) while other actions require user interaction (forms, for example). SharePoint is Microsoft’s “human” component for BPM and, for now, they have decided to leverage partners (3rd party vendors) for the machine-specific actions. Watch out for more coming in the next 2-3 years on BPM.
To learn more on Microsoft’s approach to BPM, visit here: http://www.microsoft.com/soa/bpm/default.aspx
In conclusion, if you’re looking for a job, a way to become more valuable in the market or just expand your skillset, SharePoint is an excellent choice of technology. From the chart, you can see it’s not going anywhere, anytime soon. There are upcoming trends like cloud computing, self-service BI, and BPM. Since Microsoft leverages SharePoint for all of those, it definitely won’t be a waste of time.
Guest Author: Wahid Saleemi
http://www.wahidsaleemi.com
Wahid Saleemi is a Sr. Consultant for SharePoint at Avanade. He has worked on Enterprise Systems for 10 years, mostly for the U.S. military and federal agencies in the U.S., Middle East, and South West Asia.
Wahid also blosg from time to time on his site: http://www.wahidsaleemi.com
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Great article Wahid, thanks for some hard numbers to point to as we evangalize to our customers! We are indeed in a good place if we are already embracing this technology. I was fortunate to have a really bright summer intern (Hannah Zimbeck) these past few months. She was such a joy to work with, while her friends were working on entering data on spreadsheets at the lumbar yard over the summer, she was learning Sharepoint. She picked it up in just a few weeks and was off running with solutions for everything I threw at her. Numbers like the ones in your graph above make it obvious to me that Sharepoit internships are going to be the hottest thing going. Now we need a community built internship program, so we can provide them with the best foundation possible. It won’t take long for these new grads to recognize Sharepoint is the wave to ride!
Same result for our company. I’m just finishing up with 2 University Summer interns. After 2 months…they are ending the summer by training our 40 strong Training team and have prepared a SharePoint 101 document for the attendee’s to reference.
Oh, I like that! Why don’t you write something about it and share with us here on EUSP what you did and what came out of it? That is a topic I’m very interested in. Would love to hear what other people are doing for summer intern programs.
Would love to get a copy of your 101 document and share it here on the site. Might even be worth an eBook distribution. Thanks. — Mark
I would like to see SharePoint classes offered in some schools (Community Colleges/Technical schools) here Colorado. There are classes for other Office products, why not SharePoint?
Excellent post! Targets the “hotness” of SharePoint right now, and for the future.
I found a similar chart from here: http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/sharepoint.do
I used it as a part of a successful business case to convince the company I work for to invest serious time into SharePoint as a platform for delivering business solutions. It was also enough for me to personally sign up for the USPJ Academy to get my skills to a suitable level.
The comparison to the competition in the indeed.com chart is a real eye-opener and just adds to argument that SharePoint is a pretty safe bet right now.
Thanks for the link to the charts at Indeed. It’s been a while since I needed to use that site (thankfully) so I was missing out on the data they were sharing. Now I just wish they made the data open for people like me to mash up up in my own visualizations to share back to the world.