Customer Experience, or CX for short, is a hot topic in the business world these days—and its momentum has implications for market research and customer insights career planning. This is most clear when perusing postings online for market research job openings; you will find that CX is often mentioned. Increasingly, hiring managers in our field are looking for applicants with CX skills and experience. Are you prepared to handle this shift in our job market?
Now, CX is most likely already on your radar. You can’t attend a professional conference, seminar or webinar these days without hearing someone bring up, “customer experience.
” As a result, many seasoned market researchers find themselves asking, “How different is CX from what I already do as a professional market researcher?” Well, it turns out that they’re pretty darn close. In fact, we can argue that CX is just a specialization within the market research career space. Market research is a broad professional field, encompassing many different specialties and generalist career paths. And we are seeing increasing demand for particular specialties, like CX.
To investigate this point, we’re able to check out pertinent listings on a job site like Indeed. For those of you not familiar with Indeed, it is one of the biggest career websites in the United States. Looking at US job postings, you’ll find 1,000 to 8,000 job postings specific to customer experience or CX—depending on how you define your search parameters. This snapshot showcases the growing influence of CX and its perceived value to hiring managers. And the good news? When you look at the job postings carefully, most of them are really market research—just with a new specialty label.
So, What’s Your Next Step?
As we look forward and ask the question, “What might my job title be in two years, or in five years?
”, the answer for some will be a title that contains CX. If you are currently job searching, career planning or just beginning to think about your next professional step, don’t be intimidated by the growing influence of CX. Avoid chaining yourself to limiting thoughts like, “I’m a market researcher. It will be too hard for me to get into CX.
” This is not the case. With very minor skill extensions, most professional market researchers will meet the qualifications for many jobs requiring CX experience. Also, consider refreshing your resume, looking for ways to highlight customer experience work and skills. If you are an experienced researcher, you probably have at least a few proof points that would in today’s semantics be called “CX.” CX is hot, and the trend represents a real opportunity for market research and customer insights professionals.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to go deeper on this subject, be sure to check out the related video on Research Rockstar’s YouTube channel!
