BI Professionals using Social Networking such as LinkedIn

In a recent study, Jobvite found that 80% of the people they surveyed said their companies use social media sites for recruiting, with the main information sources being LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

When Jobvite first did this survey four years ago, recruiting through social media was a new idea. Today, it appears to be the predominant method. In fact, almost all (95%) of the 800 U.S. respondents said that they had successfully hired an individual through LinkedIn.

My LinkedIn network has about 2000 direct contacts, many of whom are somehow related to the software industry. Unlike with my Facebook network, I am pretty open to LinkedIn invitations to connect. That brings my "friends of friends" LinkedIn network to over one million people. Of the 120 million people using LinkedIn, I can use my network to search about 16 million of them.

So I was curious to see the statistics for networked individuals displaying business intelligence keywords in their LinkedIn profiles. To keep it manageable, I decided to only look at those individuals living in the United States. I also removed vendor employees from the figures (e.g., for the keyword "Cognos," I ignored individuals who worked for either IBM or IBM Cognos).

Here are counts from my quick research of BI skills claimed by LinkedIn members in my network:

• SAS: 59,300 people living in the USA
• Crystal Reports: 43,600 people
• IBM SPSS: 37,000
• Business Objects: 34,500
• IBM Cognos: 28,700
• Microsoft SSRS: 17,000
• MicroStrategy: 8,300
• Oracle OBIEE: 4,200
• Actuate: 3,900
• QlikTech Qlikview: 1,400
• Information Builders WebFOCUS: 1,300
• BIRT: 1,200
• Pentaho: 900
• JasperSoft Jasper Reports: 800

Of these 14 BI products, 80% of the LinkedIn keywords clustered around two statistical analysis products (SAS and IBM SPSS) and the software products from two mega-vendors (SAP Business Objects and IBM Cognos).

The other mega-vendors Microsoft and Oracle were not far down the list. In fact, I might have slighted them by not being able to better search for the product keywords. 

Surprisingly, I saw a lack of R Stat people in LinkedIn despite the open-source statistical package being in the news and high demand of commercial products--only 126 people in the United States mentioned that skill in their LinkedIn profiles.

With so many people with SAS and SPSS skills, why would there be so few with an open source statistical package? 

Supply and demand must be at play here. If the market has limited demand for open-source products, fewer people will bother learning them. The other open-source BI products were also very far down on the list.

Of course, this is just a snapshot in time of the BI software skills in the United States. Some of these skills will decline in number and some will increase. For example, I believe that legacy tools such as Crystal Reports skills will move down the list and emerging products such as Qlikview will move up.

The bottom line for BI professionals is to maximize your opportunities by participating in social media--especially LinkedIn.

To get your own free copy of this Jobvite survey, click here. For a great infographic, see this.

To see my comments about Information Builders's BI product, go to my WebFOCUS blog.