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November 22, 2017
MRII’s survey on how the market research industry is doing in career satisfaction, growth opportunities, and learning preferences.
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On behalf of MRII, Researchscape surveyed 129 market researchers from the US, UK, and Australia using an online survey in order to better understand career satisfaction, growth opportunities, and learning preferences. The survey was fielded from July 23 to August 7, 2017. Half of the sample worked for research agencies, 19% for corporate researchers, and 20% are suppliers to both (e.g., panel companies, tools providers).
Fielded to a panel and a house list, this survey differs from many industry studies in reaching a younger, less-connected audience within the research industry, including part-time telephone and field interviewers as well as project managers. Nearly a third of respondents have worked in the research industry less than a year, and the majority had worked in market research for just 1 to 9 years (59%). In fact, a third of respondents are employed only part-time, reflecting the only-as-needed staffing of interviewers.
A quarter of respondents had planned a research career while in college, while a third entered the industry with their first job and simply stayed.
Not quite half of researchers surveyed (47%) were very or completely satisfied with their job overall.
Sample Size: 105 (81% of Respondents)
Respondents then rated their satisfaction across 13 aspects of their jobs. The following quadrant analysis of satisfaction vs. derived importance (shared variance) splits the axes by the median value of each dimension.
Higher Importance | Weaknesses
|
Key Strengths
|
Lower Importance | Vulnerabilities
|
Assets
|
Lower Satisfaction | Higher Satisfaction |
The top right quadrant contains attributes that respondents ranked above the median in terms of satisfaction and have a shared variance with overall satisfaction (derived importance) that is also above the median. These key strengths include opportunities to learn and grow as well as freedom to innovate: education and self-improvement are key strengths of research jobs. Weaknesses were pay, opportunities for advancement, workload, and expectations set for work.
Qualitative comments back up the fact that “opportunities to learn and grow” are vital to the industry. Researchers are enamored with learning. It’s a central theme about what they like about a research career:
Company-provided in-house training (42%) and formal schooling (39%) are the most common ways that respondents have learned the required skills to be a market researcher. For formal schooling, 16% of respondents learned research as part of their undergraduate major and 27% through a graduate degree (4% took both). Three out of ten learned by reading on their own.
Only 43% are very or completely likely to recommend research as a career, but three out of four researchers (77%) have said something positive about market research as a career to someone else directly, compared to 22% who have said something negative. And 18% have posted a positive comment online, compared to 1% who have posted a negative comment.
Only 59% of researchers think that it is very or completely likely that they will be working in market research a year from now, and 16% think of leaving the industry on a daily (11%) or weekly (5%) basis. Of the respondents who have worked less than a year in market research, 39% reported they were not at all likely or slightly likely to be working in the industry a year from now in contrast to 11% of those with 1 to 9 years of tenure.
While a research career might not be right for them, that didn’t mean researchers thought the industry was in trouble. For all the doom and gloom from industry pundits, four out of five researchers (81%) reported that the research industry today was generally headed in the right direction, with only one respondent (1%) saying the industry was on the wrong track (18% were unsure).
72% of corporate researchers report that market research is very or extremely important to the mission and purpose of their employer, similar to the 74% of agency researchers and suppliers who believe market research is very or extremely important to the success of organizations in general.
This exploratory research was designed to help the MRII better understand career satisfaction and education in the market research industry. Sadly, like most research within the research industry itself, this study uses convenience samples, in this case derived from a Researchscape house list and from self-identified market researchers across a range of panels.
The hope is that trade associations and other organizations will expand on this research in the future.
The full report can be downloaded from the MRII, a non-profit focused on offering global, market-leading continuing education programs for the practice of market research and insights.
Disclaimer
The views, opinions, data, and methodologies expressed above are those of the contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect or represent the official policies, positions, or beliefs of Greenbook.
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