You might not have heard much about e-commerce over the last few years. There must have been plenty of people working in the field as it has obviously been growing from strength to strength; it was just when recruiters responded to the annual QS Top MBA Recruitment and Salary survey they weren’t ticking the box to say that they had any vacancies in the area.
But this has changed in the last year or so. The 2008 survey shows that 13% of responding employers are now offering opportunities to MBAs in this field. This takes e-commerce higher than every other function except consultancy and finance, even taking it up to levels that have not been seen since the height of the dot-com boom in 1999.
Yet speak to careers specialists at top international schools and the picture is more mixed. Some schools such as Audencia Ecole de Management, Nantes, Cass Business School, London, and London Business School report that they have seen no change in demand from e-commerce, while others have detected a definite increase in interest.
“We are certainly seeing more demand for help with e-related projects,” says Carol Rue, Director, Personal and Career Development at Warwick Business School, “for example, in building e-procurement systems or to develop strategies for liaising with suppliers. And it is not just project work, we are also seeing outsourcing and partnering organizations offering career positions.”
“There’s something of a split in the market between the small and large companies,” comments Monica Piercy, Head of Careers Service at Imperial College, Tanaka Business School, London. “At the SME level there appears to be a greater appetite for e-commerce job titles. For MBAs wanting to move into an entrepreneurial organisation, such as a fresh web consultancy, this might be a great opportunity. At the corporate level, there’s less change going on. E-commerce skills and knowledge have become yet another vital requirement in any senior marketing position.”
“I think that the term e-commerce is quite loose,” argues Chris Higgins, Senior Associate Director in the MBA career management team at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, “and perhaps even old-fashioned in that it is associated with selling goods on-line in the style of Amazon or Walmart. It may be that the meaning of the term is being stretched to include the internet or software services companies, such as the likes of Google, who have certainly been hiring MBAs recently.”
The job that dare not speak its name
So what is going on? It is unlikely that large proportions of MBA graduates are suddenly being taken in to e-commerce. If this were happening, more top business schools would have seen the same phenomenon, and Wharton for example is only reporting that three or four per cent of its graduates from the last two years have gone to work in internet services. Instead, it may be that e-commerce is simply losing its negative association with the dot-com bubble while also gaining some positive credibility from the emergence of new kinds of internet service such as Facebook, Youtube et al.
Clive Ellings is Marketing Director of E-commerce Expo, a trade fair held in London at the end of October which concentrates on the on-line retail end of the spectrum. “When we launched the first E-commerce Expo in 2006, we debated whether we should use the term e-commerce as there was a possibility the word was still tainted by the dot-com bubble,” he says.
“However, the difference between today and the dot-com boom of 1999 is simply that e-commerce now works. That dot-com bubble was caused because although people could imagine how successful e-commerce could be the technology wasn’t there.”
With this technological advance, e-commerce now has the payment systems, the logistics, and the bandwidth in place for organizations to create a quality online experience and to be able to deliver on their promises, Ellings says. . “This has created a situation in which e-commerce has gone from strength to strength. There has been double digit growth in e-commerce sales in the UK in the last five years so it wouldn’t surprise me if there was more of a demand for MBAs.”
A complex role
Demand for MBAs, to whatever level it exists in e-commerce, is driven by one factor: complexity. “E-commerce roles [for MBAs] aren’t really about the technology any more,” says Carol Rue. “They are about providing leadership and developing the future. This is the way that business process and customer development strategies are going. And these new developments need project managers, strategic thinkers, and leaders. Exactly the skills that the MBA prepares people to have.”
Clive Ellings says, “Developing an e-commerce platform is really about solving intellectual problems. It’s not about simple questions such as ‘how do I find a payment processing system?’ It’s more like ‘how do I re-orientate the business to manage a totally different, high-volume sales channel which affects every aspect of the business, from back-office accounting systems to customer-service call centres to logistics, service and warranty and beyond?’ So it makes sense for there to be a need for people such as MBAs who have the ability to handle this complexity.”
Rehabilitated
Something is clearly changing. It looks like the success of e-commerce platforms among the traditional online retailers has encouraged SMEs to start using the term again. At the same time, IT and technology partnering organisations are also ticking the e-commerce box (along with marketing and consultancy) as these choices best describe the activities that their MBA hires will be involved in. Whatever stigma there was to the terms seems at last to have vanished.
Read the full article: E-commerce comes in from the cold