When I wrote my book A career with Microsoft Power BI I focused quite a bit on making research and one of it was to identify Power BI job demand using reliable data. In this article I’ll expand a little bit on job demand and outlook.
Checking job demand may also be an important factor if you choose to start and grow your business, for instance we focus 100% on Power BI contracts and hope to grow a little bit with our “Flexi Team” offer and knowing the demand for the tool and it’s outlook was an important part of our decisions.
We can check the historical data for Power BI job demand, however it will also be useful to speculate Power BI outlook for the short term and long term and the data is quite interesting in this aspect.
Power BI vs Tableau vs Qlikview?
The focus on this analysis will be Power BI job demand and outlook, however we will also be comparing the data to Tableau and Qlikview which are main Power BI competitors as the job demand and outlook can be quite different.
We will be using data from ITJobWatch.co.uk which focuses on the UK job market, however when it comes to analyzing job demand and outlook, I believe the depth of this data can be useful and easily applied to countries like United States, India, Australia, Canada, European countries and so on.
Job Demand
Let’s start with job demand ranking!
IT Jobs Watch website ranks all IT Skill / Job Role based on number of jobs and puts them into two categories: permanent IT jobs and contract IT jobs.
Please have a look at the top 5 skill / job role for permanent IT jobs.
There are over 8,000 job / skill role listed on IT Job Watch website and the highest ranking you can get is around 750 as the website uses dense ranking.
Ranking is determined based on job demand in the last 6 month (see image above) and lowest ranking 750+ has only 1 job in the last 6 months, so it’s pretty much non existent.
Job demand for Power BI, Tableau and Qlikview
Below is table with ranking and job demand for Power BI, Tableau and Qlikview.
You can see Power BI is quite ahead of Tableau and has over 2x more jobs and over 8x jobs than Qlikview. If we combine all jobs from all three tools to assess market share between these three tools that gives us :
- Power BI 63%
- Tableau 29%
- Qlikview 8%
Job demand growth and outlook
Power BI is a fairly new tool and you can see below that demand started to grow from end of 2015 and growth is significant, and the job outlook is looking good for Power BI and it is likely to steadily grow in the next 5 years or more until it reaches it’s peak.
Let’s compare it to Tableau. You can see Tableau demand started to increase in 2012 so it had about 3 years advantage over Power BI and growth is quite significant, not as much as Power BI % wise, and you can see it drops in recent months.
I suspect Tableau has reached it’s peak, which was heavily limited by Power BI competition and it’s unlikely to grow any more as businesses preferences are now on Power BI, which is something I will discuss in a minute in more details.
Qlikview was one of the first tools available on the market and you can see job demand started to grow in 2009, 6 years ahead of Power BI, however increase as much as very noticeable in the first years, it was decreasing since 2016 when both Tableau and Power BI became main competitors.
The job outlook is not looking great, job demand is already quite small and it’s likely it will slowly drop even more over the next few years.
A useful comparison of ranking between Power BI, Tableau, Qlikview and this data is not easily obtainable from IT job watch, but I kept track of it for a while and that shows clearly on a single graph how things are looking.
See below ranking.
You can see Power BI ranking in 2017 was just above 400 and that is about 400 jobs, so you can see growth of Power BI in ranking is significant and jobs is over x4 more comparing to 2017.
Tableau has continue to increase it’s ranking since 2017, however recently the ranking dropped although the difference is not that significant.
You can see Qlikview job demand has dropped and already has quite a lot ranking.
We analyzed the job demand growth, however when it comes to live jobs there is some interesting information about it:
Around 50% of Tableau / QlikView jobs mention Power BI!
This indicates that quite a few companies started with QlikView and Tableau, because Power BI either didn’t exist at the time of the decision or didn’t have all features needed, however the companies also use Power BI and it’s hard to quantify, but I suspect quite a few of these companies plan to use Power BI only in the future.
It’s hard to quantify the impact of it, however we do know it’s 50% of jobs that use a combination of tools, so the impact over the next several years is likely to be quite significant.
This data indicates to me that there is not a great job outlook for either Tableau or Qlikview as when times goes on and companies complete migration projects, the demand will simply drop as more companies will be Power BI only.
This may take a longer while as from my experience companies are still waiting for more features to be added to Power BI so they can replace Tableau and Qlikview with confidence that almost all features are available in Power BI.
What are your thoughts on job demand and outlook? Share them in comments.
Take care
Emil
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About me: Owner of a Power BI consulting business (Katie & Emil LTD) specializing in “Flexi Team” remote Power BI longer term contracts; globally (£270+/day) & in the UK (£360+/day) (LinkedIn, Website).
Life coach (details + book free introduction all), international speaker and author of a book “A Career with Microsoft Power BI“.