The dotcom years may have lived fast and died young, but they left us with a lasting legacy:  Creative job titles.  Or, as one marketing blogger terms it, 'Job  Titles 2.0'.  For a while there, you couldn't swing a cat in a hip downtown bistro without hitting a 'Chief Futurist' or 'Happiness Architect'.

When the that period flamed out, so did the mania for creative titles: Companies filled with 'Truffle Hunters' (sales/business development professionals) and 'Synthesizers' (data analysts) were often the first ones to implode and disappear, taking their $200 million in market cap along with them. Creative titles started to look like the first sign that a company was selling vapourware and wouldn't be around in another 6 months.

These days, big new media or high-tech companies still have a few Chief Visionaries and Metaverse Evangelists kicking around, but let's face it:  Having to figure out someone else's weird title or explain - for the 102nd time - what your own weird title really means starts to get to be a pain in the neck.  So most companies went back to more 'normal' titles.

However, in the past couple of years we've started to see a new job title trend:  No title at all.

The employee may have an official internal title - 'Manager Level 3' - but the title isn't used on business cards or email signatures.

Going title-less seems to happen in various situations:

•The person is the president/CEO of the organization but wants to give the impression of being 'just one of the team'

•The person is a salesperson or new business development specialist, but wants to bypass the negative "Oh, you're just the sales guy..." reaction

•The person wears several hats within the organization, and interacts with a variety of 3rd parties who would be confused by a more specific title

•The company is growing fast, so today's junior admin assistant is tomorrow's Director of Marketing - eliminating titles from business cards obviates the need to reprint cards every time a title changes
 
•Independent contractors or consultants who work on different projects with different clients



Job Titles Should Clarify, Not Confuse
 
There's little hard data about trends in job titles, but current wisdom seems to be this: job titles are only useful if they help third parties understand what a particular person does, and how that fits into the larger organization. 

One additional consequence of the creative job title backlash?  85% of employees say that having a fancy title wouldn't prevent them from leaving an organization.  So the old "Look, we can't give you a raise right now, but we'll give you a title bump to director-level..." tactic isn't as effective as it was 20 years ago.