Game plan for the recession time

No doubt the recession is coming to us. The question is, as a web analyst, are you prepared for the tough time ahead of you? What’s your game plan, if any?

Let’s face the reality.

Several things could happen to us:

1. We may lose our current job. Given the increasing importance of web analytics, this is least likely scenario unless you proved to your company, neither you nor the web analytics worth nothing to them.
2. Even we can keep our jobs, somebody has to go. The jobless rate is already at seven years high but still nowhere to compare the level in the great depression. How worse we can get? The lay-off might not impact you directly, but might impact people you rely on to make web analytics, testing & targeting work. If they are gone, you are left alone with a big trouble.
3. Even we all keep our jobs and nobody leaves, the marketing budget is likely to get cut. And that might impact the consulting services you are using or even just the planned enhancement of your current web analytics solution. All of those might be put on shelf for some time.
4. Even the marketing budget is not cut, it’s very unlikely that it will be increased either. This means you can get the nice customer experience management application that you have been dreaming or if you are a web analytics manager, you are not going to get additional headcounts to expand your global coverage. Instead, you will be asked to do more with existing resources.

You get the idea. So what you do?

Panic?

Well, I am afraid that will do you any good, either professionally or personally.

How about a denial?

My answer is “learn”

Here is why:

We all know no matter how bad the recession can be, it’s going to end, someday, most likely in our life time. The difference for all of us is not whether you can survive or not during the recession, but whether or not you can thrive after the recession. Guess who can thrive after the recession? Of course not those who are panic or denying the reality, but those who take the time to learn and grow themselves. This is true for individual as well as corporations. Checkout Mckinsey’s Learning to love recessions

So here is my game plan:

• Take the UBC web analytics course
• Attending the eMetrics Summit
• Keep myself updated via web analytics blogs
• Learn on the job: what happened (read as Omniture Sitecatalyst), why happened (read as “analysis”) and how to optimize (read as “actionable insights”) This has to be a continuous process and more important in recession than ever before
• Share my learning on this blog and other forums

I hope you have your own game plan and you are welcome to share yours here.