Who is a marketing technologist, really? 2016 Edition

The following is a guest post by Sheldon Monteiro, CTO at SapientNitro. Both he and I would really appreciate your participation in this study — it will help our whole community uncover important insights into the state of the marketing technologist profession today.

We’re conducting primary research around the role of the marketing technologist. If you consider yourself to be a marketing technologist, please read on and take the survey.

Why are we conducting this research? Despite the excitement around marketing technology, the ambiguity as to who marketing technologists are, the skills they possess, and where they sit organizationally has led to considerable confusion. Marketing technologists have no guidelines against which to benchmark and level up their own skills, or calibrate their roles in their organizations.

To help us shed more light on these issues, in August 2014, SapientNitro partnered with Scott Brinker and the MarTech conference to conduct a first-of-its-kind study of marketing technologists’ skills, career paths, attitudes, and behaviors through a comprehensive survey. We published the findings on chiefmartec.com, and our complete, in-depth analysis is available here.

However, this is a fast evolving profession, and it’s time to hear from real live practicing marketing technologists afresh. So here once again is an opportunity to participate in a crowdsourcing exercise for our community that will help us shed more light on the emerging profession of “marketing technologists” — and be entered in a drawing for one of three brand-new smartwatches — Apple or Android Wear — your choice. Click here to take the survey now.

We ask questions such as:

• What skills do we have?
• What skills are important for the future?
• What educational backgrounds do we have?
• Who do we report to in the organization?
• What are is the role of the marketing technologist in the current industry trend of digital business transformation?

The results from this survey will be freely shared with the community and published on this site. Even if you don’t participate, you’ll be able to learn from the outcome. But as part of this community, we hope you will participate. Your individual answers are completely confidential and will be maintained in a secure data center run by the analytics specialists at Decision Analyst.

It is a 10-15 minute survey — not too long, but deep enough to extract meaningful insight. While the questions are very straightforward, please read each choice carefully, as there are subtle aspects to what we do that’s important to capture.

Ready? Take the survey here. Thank you!