Antenna Software is a company that has been in the mobile app development space for roughly 12 years and is a veteran of every enterprise mobile trend that has ever come to pass. Antenna knows enterprise mobility (something we know well and first hand – in the interest of full disclosure we spent some time at Antenna and we’ve covered the company since 2003) and remains at the forefront of mobile enterprise development. The company has now added some additional insights on the entire enterprise mobility front, though this time around it isn’t of a technical nature.
Recently, the company undertook an extensive employment-focused mobility survey across both the United States and United Kingdom. Conducted by Lightspeed Research in September 2012, Antenna surveyed 600 enterprise HR managers – a substantially sized panel of survey participants, and uncovered some very interesting employment insights. Perhaps not really surprising, but nevertheless very valuable to have confirmed, it turns out that mobile skills are currently in enormous demand. Given the overall tenor of the job market, it’s certainly good to know that the mobile tech and business sectors are holding up their end on employment.
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Antenna's research, as delivered in its official report, “Antenna Mobile Strategy Benchmark 2012,” reveals that the demand for workers with mobile skill-sets will accelerate in the next 12 months. The report uncovered some very interesting statistics:
- 74 percent of US and UK businesses currently have mobile positions to fill.
- 29 percent, almost one in three companies is bringing on a “mobile strategist.”
- 51 percent of respondents say they have either already recently created or are now in the process of creating mobile-specific roles.
- 20 percent of companies are planning to create one-two new mobile related roles in the next year.
- Almost five percent plan to create as many as five to ten new mobile roles within the next year.
Clearly there are no job shortages on the mobile workforce side of things.
It is very notable that almost a third of the surveyed companies claim that they are in the hunt for a mobile strategist. What this clearly suggests is that enterprises are finally coming around to the understanding that mobility within the enterprise is no longer something that can be taken lightly or in passing or as a fast short term fix. So much enterprise business now ,either already depends on or is rapidly moving to depending on various interlinked mobile ecosystems – the workforce, partners, business customers, potentially huge numbers of consumer customers, and so on – that companies can no longer simply expect their existing IT departments to be able to deliver the right mobile solutions.
Building a centralized enterprise mobility effort (whether that encompasses a single end user-facing mobile app, a full suite of B2B and/or B2C apps, and so on) around a team with a single senior-level leader who “owns mobility” for the business becomes key. The mobile strategist will interface directly at the senior management level and provides a focused and unified mobile game plan that spans an entire organization is key to ensuring that companies effectively utilize mobility. Mobile applications must provide a delight user experience – whether the users of those apps are internal workforces or external users. Without that top-down level of input, insight and across-the-board strategic agreement, developing that critical delightful experience would simply remain out of reach for most organizations.
For companies that also have extensive end user customers, ensuring that mobility holds up its end on delivering great customer experiences requires a complete internal top-down understanding of every facet of internal and external business processes that affect customer experiences. Recently, at ITEXPO (News - Alert) Austin 2012 event that took place in early October, one of the event’s keynoters provided excellent insights on mobility and customer enablement. Antenna’s findings provide positive confirmation that enterprises finally understand both the challenges and opportunities mobility puts on the table.
Finding the Right Mobile Players
The Antenna report provides additional insights relative to the actual efforts HR teams are currently engaged in:
- 25 percent of respondents have found it difficult to find the right workers.
- 93 percent have indicated that the difficulty in finding the right workers is not due to a lack of applicants, but rather the absence of people that are able to offer the right qualities for the job.
- 40 percent of organizations say that in spite of the difficulties in finding the right candidates, the overall volume of applicants for mobile openings has been instrumental in allowing HR to fairly easily fill new mobile roles.
These findings point to the importance of clearly defining what skill sets and qualities are most crucial for these new roles as they are created. Again, having a mobile strategist in place will drive such efforts to define specific mobile skill sets.
We recently spoke with Jim Somers, chief marketing and strategy officer at Antenna, and we asked him to drill down a bit into what a mobile strategist needs to immediately think about. Somers notes that “Priority #1 for any mobile strategist needs to be to step away from the desk and take inventory of all the mobile touch points within his or her business. Take a ‘customer first’ approach and assess how the world views you through a mobile lens. Sure, stats and figures are good, but there's no better context to have in your pocket than what the customer thinks. This foundation will help you prioritize where to start and drive urgency with your line of business owners, who at the end of the day are your clients.” It’s excellent advice.
Antenna's research has also uncovered that the mobile skill-sets most in-demand with UK and US businesses at the present time are those related to mobile development and mobile management. More specifically:
- 20 percent of businesses are currently recruiting mobile app developers and mobile content creators
- 23 percent are looking to hire those with mobile device management (MDM) expertise.
The uptick in mobile management skills is specifically aligned with the ongoing BYOD trend that many companies are grappling with today as more new devices are released into the market. We can expect that enterprises will also begin to look for mobile application management (MAM) skills as mobile apps begin to proliferate within all businesses.
All in all, it’s good to know that the mobile market segment is holding its own on the employment front.
Antenna provides a complete cloud-based enterprise mobility suite targeting the creation and management of mobile apps, websites and content across an entire business. AMPchroma delivers the ability to create, control, measure, adapt and future-proof mobile business strategies for employees, partners, and both business and consumer customers.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
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