Business Process Management Skills and Roles: An Investigation of the Demand and Supply Side of BPM Professionals

Business Process Management BPM as a discipline covers a wide spectrum of tasks, from the definition of strategic process objectives to the technical implementation of process execution infrastructure. This paper compares and contrasts the process roles demanded by industry with the backgrounds of BPM professionals. We perform a content analysis of advertised job positions in order to compare the skill sets demanded by industry with those found in an extensive study of BPM practitioner profiles. Our findings suggest several discrete roles: Chief Process Officer, Process Owner, Process Architect, Process Consultant, and Process Analyst. We find that while consultants and analysts are the most sought-after positions, they also represent the largest pool of available BPM professionals on the market. Roles that indicate a higher level of maturity such as Process Architects are solicited much less frequently, but are used by job seekers as advertising labels. We find Chief Process Officers to be a desirable role from an organizational maturity perspective, but also the rarest and highest qualified role on the supply side. Our findings provide initial insight for BPM education programs and potential BPM career trajectories.