E-commerce Generating Career Opportunities for Senior Talent, Notes Augusto Beato

The rise of e-commerce has increased opportunities for senior talent to move in from established industries such as the FMCG and banking spaces, observes Augusto Beato of Portland SEO.

He was reacting to a study by Kuala Lumpur-based e-commerce company iPrice Group that showed the number of employees in the biggest e-commerce firms in the Southeast Asian region growing by around 40 percent over the last two years.

The study was conducted through LinkedIn and covered Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. It looked at e-commerce giants such as Lazada, Shopee, Zalora, Tokopedia, and Bukalapak.

It found that the workforce of these largest players grew by an average of 808 employees per quarter between the end of 2016 and the third quarter of last year, equivalent to around 40 percent over the two-year period.

These figures come amid reports of a growing Internet economy in Southeast Asia, which is on track to exceed US$240 billion by 2025, according to a report released last November by Google and Temasek. This economy now stands at US$72 billion in gross merchandise value.

"E-commerce firms need people to run its functions in marketing, finance, research and development, human resources, and operations," said Beato, who is the CEO of Portland SEO. "It is no longer just about hiring delivery drivers or warehouse workers in the e-commerce hiring space."

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According to the iPrice study, operations is the department with the most employees in e-commerce firms, followed by marketing and engineering. The firms also require long-term and specific talents.

Hires for the e-commerce space can range from fresh graduates to professionals, managers, executives, and technicians who have been re-skilled, experts said.

Since the startups are mushrooming rapidly so are their needs to get their work done, which in return is creating job opportunities in different levels such as managerial posts, IT department, media, and PRs and lastly for cleaning and security purposes.