Desk Research for New Automation Professional Role
Context
At IBM, our Automation team was interested to learn more about how the role of the “automation professional” has changed in recent years with the development of RPA tools, along with how COVID-19 has impacted automation roles. There was a need to speak to automation professionals about their roles, however, we wanted to first get a baseline knowledge of the responsibilities, skills, tools and education that automation professionals possess by preforming desk / secondary research.
The objective of this research was to learn more about the role of the automation professional to aid in development efforts at IBM. This research sought to give automation professionals a voice with IBM experiences by continuously aligning automation professional needs with upcoming design efforts.
Tools: Excel
Methods Used: Secondary Research
Timeframe: 2 Weeks
Secondary Research
In order to learn more about the role of the automation professional, we primarily pulled data from 3 sources: LinkedIn Profiles, Job Postings and Market Research.
LinkedIn Profiles
On LinkedIn, I analyzed the job profiles of current Automation Professionals to determine what education, skills and responsibilities they currently had. I also looked at the career progression of these individuals, to better understand if they got their start on the IT or the business-side.
Job Postings
On Indeed & LinkedIn, I analyzed job postings for open “Automation Professional” roles to understand what education and skills that companies are currently seeking from these roles, along with what responsibilities would be expected out of an Automation Professional.
Market Research
Using various market reports from sources like Gartner and Forbes, I also looked at market analyses regarding the the role of the Automation Professional and how it has evolved in recent years.
Market Research Background
RPA software has grown quickly because it allows individuals with minimal or even no-coding skills (e.g., business experts and front-line workers) to automate low-level tasks (Lawton, 2020).
COVID-19 Implications
Automation is especially important during COVID-19; industries that have not adopted advanced technologies may be unprepared (Lawton, 2020) and choosing the right AI and RPA tools can help companies overcome legacy technology issues (Forbes, 2020).
“I’ve heard reports of IT departments working 72 hours straight to prepare for employees to work from home and friends whose work has been interrupted by systems constantly going down.”
Case Study
A particular airline had a team of 27 people handling travel cancellations. Each cancellation took an average of 6 minutes. After COVID-19 hit, it has a 15-fold increase in cancellation requests. The airline quickly implemented bots to handle the increase in requests with a smaller team.
“This idea of using bots for dealing with business resiliency is an aspect of the pandemic we are starting to see more of.”
There is a trend away from traditional IT owning and operating automation in its entirety.
“You wouldn’t see a lead of automation five years ago. It used to be that people got together only when there was a significant failure. Now, these teams connect the dots between the business and information technology.”
“A lot of those people are struggling because there isn’t a clear training path for them, or a clear definition of what their role is.”
— General Manager of Automation Testing Company
Analysis
I started off by accumulating job postings and profiles from Automation Professionals and organized them into tables on BoxNote. (1/2)
I then analyzed and tagged responsibilities, skills and education in the postings and profiles in Excel to identify themes across the data in order to see what are the most common and important aspects of the Automation Professional role. (2/2)
Readout & Results
After the secondary research was conducted regarding the automation professionals, the findings were presented to the team and it was determined that there were currently discrepancies with current personas IBM had for automation roles.
This led to more more research needed to be done to understand the evolving role of the automation professional. Therefore, it was important to start conducting qualitative research and talk to automation professionals themselves in 1x1 interviews to get a better understanding of their use cases, needs, and pain-points.