NetSuite Administrators are in High Demand

Increasing Market Demand for NetSuite Administrators & Consultants

NetSuite Administrators are in high demand and are proving to be a difficult role to fill within organizations. The specificity of the skill set required, complex certification journeys, and the extremely broad depth of NetSuite’s capabilities make being an administrator a daunting task.

Afterall, NetSuite administrators are responsible for troubleshooting, optimizing, integrating, and generally maintaining your NetSuite instance. It requires discipline of both technical knowhow along with business acumen. You’ll need someone who not only understands how to maintain and optimize NetSuite, but also understands the business goals and strategies that the organization is trying to accomplish with NetSuite. This way, they can not only administer NetSuite, but optimize it to your business objectives.

What is a NetSuite Administrator?

Simply put, NetSuite Administrators are an integral part of any team operating on NetSuite. Due to NetSuite’s high customizability and robust functionality, administrators are needed to keep everything running smoothly and efficiently. A NetSuite Administrator’s day-to-day tasks might involve configuring and maintaining the instance, managing users, roles, and permissions, creating dashboards and reports, adding new modules, or automating routine processes.

Why are NetSuite Administrators hard to find?

As of the time of writing, there are currently 602 open Jobs on LinkedIn for a NetSuite System Administrator. These NetSuite Administrator jobs are roughly split down the middle between remote (284) and onsite (281) with 37 offering the flexibility of a hybrid work environment.

With NetSuite boasting just over 36,000 users as of mid-2022, this means that roughly 2% of all NetSuite using companies currently have a NetSuite System Administrator posting on LinkedIn at the same time. There are a number of reasons why companies struggle to find the right NetSuite talent for their team, and we’ll touch on the most common reasons below.

Lack of local NetSuite Admin talent:

While the pandemic led to a boom in remote work, more and more companies are returning to a hybrid or on-site structure. With the housing market in wild fluctuation, relocation is not as simple as it once was. This forces a company to offer a very attractive onboarding package or limit the potential applicants to the local area.

When you do find the right person in your backyard, you are now competing with their option to work remotely. According to a recent Blind survey 64% of employees said they would choose working from home over a $30,000 pay increase.

Regardless of on-site, hybrid, or remote work, you’re competing against a large pool of potential employers.

Netsuite Certified Administrators are expensive:

The System Administrators with 100% of the experience you are looking for are already working and are well compensated. You can find yourself opening your wallet further than you’d like if you want to buy-out a full-time employee from another company.

Supply and demand. Even if you are lucky to find a good NetSuite Administrator, the salary requirements may be more than what works for your budget.

Lack of 360 degree knowledge:

System Administrators with prior experience at one or two companies will provide strong system administrative support for your team. These support tasks include: setting up employees and roles, running saved searches and reports, adding custom fields, and researching topics in SuiteAnswers.

However, the chances are they might not be skilled to address more complex requirements. These requirements range from understanding why your financial statements are manual to run, or why certain data is not accessible, or why your month end process takes two weeks at the end of the month.

Further, really challenging opportunities like: Switching costing methods from FIFO to Average, optimizing and automating NetSuite, setting up new modules or additional subsidiaries, or understanding how NetSuite handles the new Lease Accounting Standards ASC 842 & IFRS 16 is also not likely in their wheelhouse.

In these instances, you find yourself either suffering from lack of optimization, or hiring multiple administrators to each focus on specific aspects of your NetSuite instance. Having multiple full-time administrators on your payroll is just another way the costs can snowball.

Training is difficult and costly:

How much does it cost to get NetSuite certified? Getting certified can cost thousands of dollars when you factor in training time, exam costs, study materials, etc. Plus, users will need a NetSuite instance to practice and learn with, which isn’t something they often have access to outside of work.

Factoring in all of these roadblocks, it becomes obvious why so many companies are struggling to properly fill their NetSuite Administrator roles. Fortunately, there’s a solution that overcomes these barriers while proving cost-effective. Outsourcing some or all of your NetSuite administrator tasks to an experienced NetSuite consulting firm like ScaleNorth can save you both time, money, and frustration.