Introduction
The BizOps function has become incredibly prominent across companies of all sizes, stages, and sectors. Due to the high variability of BizOps job descriptions, the jobs that such professionals can “graduate” into are also varied.
Our goal for undertaking this research is to assist current and future BizOps practitioners in understanding their possible career pathways and advocating to achieve them. We collected data about “BizOps Alumni” (i.e. those who moved onto another role) and considered demographic factors such as gender, location, and education, as well as the seniority levels, functions, and roles that these graduates find themselves in today. At times, we refer to these folks as “BOA” as a shorthand for BizOps Alumni throughout our report.
If you’d like to discuss the report and elevate your career through peer support, upskilling, and thought leadership, join the BizOps Network. Apply here to access the data and join a peer group of hundreds of other strategy and operations professionals.
About the BizOps Network
BizOps is an internal smokejumper role that applies business strategy and analytics to improve processes and solve problems to drive revenue, profitability and growth. BizOps stands at the nexus of the most important issues facing a company, such as vendor selection & implementation, process improvement / automation, financial modeling, M&A, and enabling other functions.
More generally speaking, BizOps can:
— Parachute into any problem area and dig in and fix it.
— Build and drive processes that help the company scale, including running quarterly business reviews, OKRs, budgeting, etc.
— Join an underperforming team and take over the project and people management duties, while focusing the former manager as the subject matter expert.
— Run any meeting effectively, and train managers how to do so.
BizOps defies definition because the function never exists in the same way across all organizations. But one definition of BizOps most practitioners would agree with is: “an internal decision-support and execution team that brings multiple skills and business functions together to make a company and its product areas better in every way.
If you’d like to learn more, we’ve written a great deal about BizOps here.
Methodology
We analyzed publicly available data on ~400 former BizOps professionals, spanning educational history, work history, skills, endorsements, location, and more. We painstakingly combed through this unstructured data to remove erroneous information and verified collected data to the extent possible.
However, we do acknowledge that public data from sources such as LinkedIn, just like self-reported survey data, can have faults, especially around credential and title inflation. LinkedIn is social media, after all. With that said, we have made best efforts to draw statistically significant conclusions about the BizOps function and its potential graduation pathways. With LinkedIn showing ~8400 BizOps professionals, our data will get us to a confidence level of 95%+, so you can rest assured knowing this report is reliable.
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