The most in-demand jobs you've never heard of
Since her years of experience in customer service evolved into a more sophisticated role, Tegan Oakley has been surprised at how high the demand for her skills have become.
As a Customer Success Director for a Human Resources IT company in Sydney, she not only continues to provide customer service, she takes an active role in ensuring the success of her business clients. She says the role makes use of her past experience in accounts management and customer service.
"I partner with customers to really ensure their success and to optimise their solutions," Ms Oakley said.
"Typically, customer service back in the day was more of a reactive service. Now customer success is seen as a consultative arm of the business that adds value to customers and ensures they meet their objectives.
"What is surprising is how much of a demand that customer success has become."
The customer success role is among the top emerging jobs for this year, according to online job seeking company LinkedIn. Its analysis of millions of jobs for a five-year period has found high demand for the roles of:
Customer success manager: managing software, customer relationships and consulting.
Data scientist: Skilled in using digital analytics and data mining
Full stack engineer: Help make sense of mountains of data and skilled in software engineering and working with Java computer programming.
Cyber security expert: Skilled in computer and information security, consulting and security management.
Experience designer: Makes digital services including apps and websites easier to use through research and testing.
Jason Laufer, senior director of learning and talent solutions at LinkedIn said it was no surprise that tech roles dominated the top emerging jobs.
He said new business models fuelled by technology and software services had increased demand for customer success managers, which were not popular five years ago.
"Customer success jobs have grown 38 per cent year on year over the last 12 months," Mr Laufer said.
"Organisations now place immense value in maintaining positive engagement with customers.
"As a result, roles which require strong skills in human interaction and soft skills such as communication and collaboration have exploded."
The LinkedIn data found that many employers were looking for a combination of soft skills and technology.
Mr Laufer said LinkedIn analysed millions of job titles and counted the frequencies of job titles held in 2013 compared with titles held in 2017. The top five job titles saw the largest growth in frequency over the five-year period.