Career Progression in Market Research during the Pandemic

It's the question we all have.

We hear about the job market in every news outlet. It's moving, it's shaking, it's changing.

But what about jobs in market research?

Well, I decided to investigate.

I took a random sample of 300 LinkedIn profiles in market research - 50 per company - and looked at the rate of job changes in the industry between March 2020 and March 2022.

So, what happened?

We carried on

First of all, I am very glad to see that the market research industry and community carried on. While many industries took a huge hit and are still looking at recovery dates, market research companies - based on the average job change - seem to have continued growing.

On this point, there's one key number you're looking for: 0.76.

This number is the overall aggregated rate of job change on our sample. In simple terms, it means that 0.76 person got promoted or changed jobs during the pandemic.

It sounds like not much, but keep in mind that if this number had been 0.50, one out of every two people would have had a job change.

Overall, this is pretty good.

Especially when we factor in the fact that I did not control for any variables - be it seniority, department or country.

Smaller companies saw more change

In our sample, we have two larger companies, Kantar & Ipsos, and three smaller companies, GWI, YouGov & Euromonitor.

What's interesting to see, is that there's a strong correlation between the size of the company - in terms of headcount - and the job changes happening during the pandemic.

Larger companies had less movement, while smaller companies had more. The outcast in this instance is Euromonitor, to which I will come back to below.

GWI and YouGov - the shakers

How do we explain the changes at GWI and YouGov?

For GWI, it seems to come down to methodology. I have personally noticed GWI growing on my LinkedIn feed with a large amount of new hires.

And this is exactly what led to a score above one.

This study considers all job changes between March 2020 and March 2022 - as long as you are still working at the said company. This means that the first job you get (not a promotion, but when you are hired) was counted as one.

GWI had an impressive amount of new hires during the pandemic, and this is what took it above one.

But what about YouGov?

Because I worked at YouGov at the start of the pandemic, I have a bit of insider knowledge on this.

YouGov decided to restructure teams and the organisation. It introduced 'product' roles for former account managers, and new roles according to verticals (for example, head of agencies).

This is no judgment of good or bad, but it does mean that a lot of job changes were captured in the sample as a result of this restructuring.

It should also be noted that a smaller company such as YouGov probably has more flexibility for such bold moves, and would therefore be in lined with the correlation highlighted in the graph above.

Euromonitor - the most 'on trend' company?

Okay, what about Euromonitor?

Full disclosure, this is the company I currently work for - so I have even more insider knowledge!

Euromonitor's sample scored 0.72 - while the overall average is 0.76. This puts Euromonitor as the most in line company of the sample.

Euromonitor was the company with a large sample of long standing employees - employees who had been in the firm for 5, 10 or even more than 15 years.

Consequently, I saw less job changes in these profiles.

This makes sense.

The velocity of job changes is much higher at the beginning of our careers. It is easier to go from Junior Research to Senior Research than it is to go from VP to CEO.

This is where Euromonitor is an outcast in our graph. It is a relatively smaller company, but it has fostered the impressive careers found in the larger companies.

The double promotions

One fun piece of data I captured is the amount of people who changed jobs twice during the pandemic (while staying at the same company and still employed there as of May 2022).

The data doesn't seem statistically significant to warrant a real difference across the 6 companies of our sample, but it's great to see these numbers.

YouGov led the way with 8 double pandemic promotions, followed by Euromonitor at 7, and Kantar & GWI at 6 each.

If you are among these double promoted: congratulations, it's great to see.

We're more similar than we think

What this little study showed me is that we are more similar than we think.

I saw very comparable patterns across job changes.

It's also worth reemphasising that I did not control for any variables. It is possible that, had I controlled for job seniority, the story would be much different.

Nonetheless, the key piece of insight here was the size of the organisation. Larger organisations were more stable. Ipsos for example saw the largest amount of no job changes in our sample - at more than half.

It's not all about promotions

It's always tricky to look at your competitors.

But I'd like to end up on a lighter note.

First, the industry as a whole is vibrant has has kept offering opportunities and career growth. Regardless of your company, this is a great observation that should be celebrated.

Second, it's not all about promotions. We cannot judge each other only on the basis of job title changes. They're an unfortunate proxy to our development, both personal and professional.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it seems to be that work has many different facets.

We are also ourselves all different, and are at different stages of our lives.

I genuinely believe that there's no one best company.

But there's one best company for one specific person at a specific period of their lives.

I wish you to find yours.