Agile Industry Watch: Agile Jobs Increasing while Titles Are Not

Recently, we held a free web seminar that took a look at the Agile Industry as a whole. Following the event, questions we received lead us to take a deeper look at job titles in the Agile space.

We have an Agile Salary Survey that we conducted in the Spring of 2009, and we will be releasing the results early Q3 2009. What we noticed was that it was much harder to get Agile professionals to participate than it was to get business analysis professionals to participate in a similar survey we were conducting for that audience over the same period of time.

That data, combined with what we are seeing from our customers, has lead us to conclude that Agile is not yet seen as a job title, but is seen as a skill. SDLC professionals seem themselves as someone in a particular position that happens to have Agile as a skill (I.E. a Consultant who knows Agile, a PM/BA with Agile experience, a Programmer who knows Agile, etc.)

Surprisingly, however, data shows that Agile jobs are on the rise. As you can seen in the trend graph below, there was a dip in SDLC jobs in late 2008, but they spiked back up a year later. Looking over the entire time period of the graph, Agile jobs have consistently been on a steeper climb, and did not see the same dip in late 2008. In fact, by late 2008 their data shows that there were actually more Agile job listings and that still holds true today.

That is pretty consistent to what we see from our customers, though we’ve seen a huge interest in Scrum over the last couple years. As you can see, Scrum has continued to slowly grow and looks though it will continue for the foreseeable future.

The good news is that as Agile jobs are growing, so are the salaries for Agile positions. There is obviously some concern, especially in today’s market, about not pigeonholing yourself and solely marketing yourself as an Agile PM/BA/Programmer/etc., but data is showing the increasing importance and benefits of having Agile knowledge, experience and certification. Though you may not see more Agile job titles anytime soon, you can bet that you will see more and more people with Agile designations and experience listed on their resumes.

If you are looking to get started in Agile, wanting to refine you knowledge, or are looking to get certified, check out our Agile training curriculum and free resources.