An article last week in the Wall Street Journal cited the rise in demand for compliance officers at banks. Hefty fines levied for noncompliance by the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau resulted in more than $530 million in fines – at least as of October of 2013 (see this blog post).

The net result, however, for compliance officers is a small hiring boom, the WSJ reports. This sparked a natural question for this blog: what’s the state of jobs in contract management and administration?

It’s hard to state this definitively because of the very broad nature of the job description. But even a casual search for jobs in contract administration and management yields interesting results.

Many of these jobs in contract management have to do with government contracts, and many of these jobs are essentially legal in nature. But certainly not all – there’s a very broad need for people familiar with contract administration at all levels. Here is a very unscientific snapshot of the number of jobs available on a couple popular job-posting sites.

From Monster.com:

• — Searching for any job containing the words “contract management”: 1,000 jobs
• — Searching for the job title Contract Administration (without quotes): 400 results.
• — Searching for the specific title “Contract Administrator”: 135 results

 

On Indeed.com (which claims to be the No. 1 job site with 100 million unique visitors per month) searching is more general, yielding more results. For example, the first search box you use on the site is for “job title, keyword, or company” and the second is for location. Obviously, this means when you search for a term, that term can be in the job title OR anywhere in the description.

On Indeed.com

• — Searching for jobs containing “contract administration”(quotes used) in the title or description: 3,566 results.
• — Searching for “contract specialist” (quotes used) yielded many jobs with that exact title): 523 results.
• — Searching for “contract manager” (quotes used) yielded: 760 jobs.

 

What is even more interesting is that for “contract administration,” 905 of the 3,566 results were for jobs paying more than $80,000. For “contract specialist,” 89 of the 523 jobs were for more than $80,000. And finally, for “contract manager” 185 of 760 results were for more than $80,000.

Of course, this is just a snapshot in time of these listings, but it is fair to say even in an economy with an unemployment rate above 7 percent, there certainly are a lot of jobs related to contract management and administration.

Photo Credit: Will Merydith via Compfight cc

[About the author: Todd Hyten is a former business journalist who now writes about B2B topics and consults on content marketing. You can find him on Twitter and Google+.]