The emerging role of the journey manager represents one of the most important developments since the creation of the Chief Customer Officer, yet many in the customer experience field have yet to encounter a journey manager within their organizations—or to develop a working knowledge of their typical job responsibilities and challenges. That’s not surprising: Compared to the 1.6 million product managers that you’ll find today on LinkedIn, journey managers number fewer than 2,000. However, this figure represents nearly 65% year-over-year growth—and I believe that’s just the beginning.

At Kerry Bodine & Co., we’ve been curious about the types of companies who are on the cutting edge of implementing this nascent role. So back in March 2018, we embarked on the task of scouring more than 400 randomly selected LinkedIn profiles of people who currently held a journey manager position. Here’s what we found.

We started by looking at geographical distribution. Accounting for 39% of the LinkedIn members in our study, England was the clear leader in early execution of the journey manager role. Scotland took a distant second place with 7%. Add in a few journey managers form each of Northern Ireland and Wales, and nearly half of those in our study (48%) hailed from the United Kingdom. Next on the list were Belgium and the United States—ahem, a country with a population nearly 29 times of that of Belgium—which both accounted for 6% of our journey managers.

Not surprisingly given the UK data, European organizations employed the vast majority (77%) of the journey managers in our study. However, we did find at least a handful of journey managers on each of six continents. (No journey managers in Antarctica… yet!)

We also looked at the industry category listed for each journey manager’s current company on LinkedIn. Banking and other financial services firms accounted for over a third of those in our study—followed by the telecommunications, computer software, and utilities industries, which each accounted for more than 5% of journey managers. Not surprisingly, the majority of the companies we examined were service-based. However, we did find journey managers in product-focused industries, including apparel & fashion, building materials, chemicals, cosmetics, food & beverages, luxury goods and jewelry, and packaging & containers.

The hiring organizations read like a Who’s Who of some of the world’s biggest and most respected brands, like Aviva, Barclays, BBVA, British Gas, Fiat Chrysler, Greenpeace, HSBC, John Lewis, Latam Airlines, Nestle, Qantas, Royal Bank of Scotland, Virgin Media, and Vodafone.

Are you ready to join them?