Introduction

Are you a business based in Melbourne (Australia) and considering creation of upgrade of online store based on Magento eCommerce? If you answered yes, you’ve come to the right place. In “Magento Melbourne scene” series of articles  I’ll try to provide you with an overview of options that you as a business have if you want to develop online store based on Magento eCommerce platform and your key requirement is to work with a local solution provider with office in Melbourne or hire people to work for you as in-house team again locally in Melbourne.

Pool of Magento talents in Melbourne

Let’s start from the overview of the talent pool: how many people know (or at least claim that know) Magento in Melbourne? To find out I’ve analysed several sources of information.

LinkedIn data

According Social Media News there were 3,900,000 Australian accounts in LinkedIn (July 2014), which is around 1/3 of total number of working Australians. In IT/digital the share of professionals who have LinkedIn profile is much hire and while I don’t know exact numbers, empiric evidences based on personal experience tell me that 9 out of 10 people working in the industry are listed in LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is pretty good source of information about talents availability.

Search of LinkedIn with keyword Magento and limited by Melbourne geographically shows that there are 937 people who have Magento mentioned in their profile.

Further researches uncover more interesting insights, presented on the charts below

Magento professionals in Melbourne, distribution by industry

Magento professionals in Melbourne, distribution by job title

Note that the sum of all titles is more than 900 because some people have more than one keywords I researched in the title (like “UX designer/consultant”) and I checked both past and current titles.

Top companies in Melbourne employing Magento professionals

Based on the data above we can make several conclusions:

• Most people with Magento skill work vendor/agency side rather than client side
• It is more or less balanced number of people working in technical (development) and business (management) areas
• There are just few companies here that have over 10 people who know Magento (at least according their LinkedIn profiles), especially interesting to see that some Magento Gold and Silver partners (I’ll cover it more in Part 2) are not in the list of top companies employing Magento experts in Melbourne;

Magento Certification data

You may rightfully think that it isn’t enough to claim that you know Magento, it would be nice to see some proof. Thanks to Magento Certification program it is possible: Magento has 3 certifications for developers and one for business experts with the directory of certified professionals available online. Queries through this directory show that there are 37 Magento certified professionals in Victoria (it isn’t exactly Melbourne, but very close).

Here is the chart showing number of certificates issued for each four categories.

Magento Certified Experts in Victoria

Note that some people (like our Technology Director Francis) have more than one certification, so total number of certificates more than total number of people.

Simple calculation shows that just 4% of people who claim to know Magento are certified, so probably significant share of almost 1000 people who listed Magento in their LinkedIn profile have not so solid experience with the platform. While I admit that there may be number of skilled people who just didn’t bother to pass the test, from the customer or employer point of view working with Magento certified experts is a good way to reduce the risks – Magento certification isn’t easy to pass and requires good knowledge of the platform.

In the Part 2 of “Magento Melbourne scene” I’ll write about the options that a business have when it needs to develop Magento-based online store – do it in-house or outsource and pro-et-contra of both ways, so stay tuned via Twitter or subscribe to our email newsletter.