How many people really work in pricing‪?‬ Pricing College Podcast

We know that our listeners are interested in pricing, revenue management and boosting profits - but how many people really work as dedicated pricing professionals in Australia.
The answer is not very many at all.
Aidan and Joanna try to estimate the actual number.
 
In the last few months, we've all been experiencing quite a lot of change with COVID, the whole crisis and the government's response to it. One of those has been the serious economic challenges that we're all dealing with many people now have lost their jobs. A lot of people now are thinking about re-skilling. Some people are thinking don't know what to do and going for advice. We get a lot of people calling us asking us, “what to do next in terms of career planning?”. And it's brought on the question of, how many real pricing jobs and even executives are there in Australia? Are there as many as we think? A lot of people say pricing is very niche. How niches have that become now? Or is it a growing market that people should come to?
The other thing I'd say is we often see people saying, or they're moving to Australia. They're moving territory country. Are there any pricing roles available? I have to be completely honest, there are not very many pricing jobs available. It is a small profession. It applies not only in Australia but also in many other countries, it is a small profession. We'll come up with a number later in this podcast to what we asked to be. That's the first thing I say. The second thing I'll say is a lot of roles are seen as pricing or advertised if you went to jobs board and jobs websites. They're not pricing roles in the context of which we discussed pricing. You'll often get the classic transfer pricing and currency taxation thing which is completely different. You get pricing through commodities but more monopoly businesses, such as electricity, gas, water those sorts of things. Which again is different, it's more about government regulation. When we're talking about the stuff we talked about day in day out on our podcast that category of jobs is small.
Yes and even within that small category of jobs. You might see a few pricing analysts in B2B and B2C retail advertise say on LinkedIn or wherever. But when you look closely at the job description you'll find they are not strategic pricing roles. Those are considering data or customer value and trying to unpack that to drive profitability. They're still very much on the admin side. When I say price admin sort of level very operational maybe a touch of stakeholder engagement. But very much like just maintaining the price records. Extracting data out of the system. And doing a sort of very basic margin price cost analysis. Even going down the route accountancy doing cost accounting to then allocate cost to derive a cost-plus price. You'll see that a lot but it's still more on the maintenance of an old cost-plus system. Not what we discuss on the podcast and more advanced the latest pricing strategy revolving around value-based pricing and dynamic pricing.
In another aspect, pricing the closest thing to it is probably revenue management. Through the whole COVID the crisis and the government shutdown. Just almost as if the government believes that closing down revenue management jobs will stop the spread of the illness. When you look at how revenue management was most advanced in companies such as airlines, hotel chains, cruise ships and car rental businesses. Pretty much the people who've been ground zero for this shutdown in Australia and internationally. So, that is a sector that's very much under pressure. We have to be honest about this. The skills that they have and working at value for customers optimising revenue. Those skills are used less frequently in other sectors. They probably have been growing in the supermarket's potentially some of the major supermarket chains. We have to be honest pricing is still in its infancy. One of the reasons we do this podcast every week is to