100 Compliance Jobs Analyzed. What Hiring Managers Are Looking For in 2025?
Recently I decided to analyze 100 active random ethics and compliance job vacancies. The goal was to identify new hiring trends and most in-demand compliance skills in 2025. The vacancies are from around the world across various compliance levels: from analyst to directors. Most of such jobs are from various strong global companies like Ericsson, Meta, Marriot, Herbalife, PwC, Abbvie, Veon, Marvel, Ebay, Vodafone, and others. You can find the full list of the vacancies used for the analysis here.
So, here are the top 5 compliance trends that I’ve identified:
1) Building Integrity Cultures is now a Major Compliance Skill.
About 40% of the vacancies explicitly require candidates to have experience in building and / or strengthening ethical cultures. I hope this indicates that more and more compliance functions move from a rule-based to a culture-based programs approach.
Meanwhile, this is probably the hardest compliance area for any compliance officer to get experienced with. This area is so nuanced, slow to make changes, requires a lot of persuasion, relationship building and stakeholder engagement. But in the meantime, it is the most self-enriching, important and impactful area of compliance.
If you are only at the beginning of learning the Compliance Culture skills – I would highly recommend to watch the course on Coursera: Unethical Decision Making in Organizations (https://www.coursera.org/learn/unethical-decision-making). It’s a very good starting point.
2) You generally don’t need a law degree for a compliance job. However, you are likely to need it if you want to become a compliance director.
A surprising 88% of the roles I reviewed do not require a law degree and are open to candidates with other degrees (e.g. audit, finance, economics, etc.). In the meantime, once you aim for Compliance Director level positions, a law degree is generally required. Companies on our review list, including for example AMD, Hays, Alto, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, Adobe – all have the law degree requirement for their compliance director roles.
So, you are likely to be able to get most jun-mid level C&E positions without a law degree. However, if your ambitions drive you to one day become a Compliance Director, a legal degree might significantly improve your chances (you can actually do it parallel to your job).
3) Doing Compliance Training is the Most Sought Compliance Skills
78% of reviewed vacancies expect candidates to deliver training – online or in person. This means – having strong presentation, public speaking, event management, PR, LMS systems and of course, powerpoint skills.
4) Data Analytics Skills can be your strong competitive advantage
11% of reviewed vacancies (including PwC, Herbalife, Marvell, eBay, etc) require data analytics knowledge and skills. Some of the companies clearly indicate what exact analytics tools they want you to know (e.g. Tableau, Power BI). Not a huge trend but might be a competitive advantage.
5) Investigation and Risk Assessment skills are in high demand
Nearly half of reviewed vacancies mention investigations as a required skill or a major responsibility. And 32% of vacancies expect candidates to be skilled in conducting anti-corruption and other compliance risk assessments. Definitely two of the most critical skills every compliance professional shall be trained in.
What does this mean for your compliance career?
If you are strategic enough, you may convert the trends into your competitive advantages outcompeting other people on the market and making your chances of getting a next great role stronger.
