Hi Peter,

My advice would be to learn as much as you can hands-on in a commercial environment, and your current role certainly appears to tick this box. This is the approach I took and you can't put a value on building expertise in this way.

You should aim to become the analytics/conversion optimisation evangelist within your organisation, continually providing key insights and presenting the business case for investing in on-going conversion improvement.

If you haven't already I also strongly recommend you 'get in to bed' with testing, both A/B and multivariate. Having an understanding and appreciation of what to test and what tools are available will become invaluable for you, especially with you already having a good understanding of analytics.

Good luck with your career development in conversion improvement and optimisation, and message me if you would like some more advice.

Paul
http://twitter.com/paulrouke

@Peter - my simplest piece of advice would be to start *doing* as much as you can and learn by experience. Set up your own site (e.g. a blog) and use all the great free tools out there to start experimenting and learning. 

As an employer, the thing I mostly look for when interviewing is a genuine passion to do, in this case, optimisation and the best evidence I have for that passion is that someone is actually doing it because they *want* to - all the better if they're doing in their own time as this shows real commitment. Also, reading all the relevant bloggers and specialists out there to keep up to date with what's going on.

My pleasure Peter, and I'm sure you won't regret moving into your new career of search marketing, analytics and conversion optimisation.

On the subject of career change, going back over 15 years I was studying to be an electrical engineer with British Aerospace, and my new career choice certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time!

As for taking the thread slightly off-topic, I would say your request for advice was as good a place as any with the thread being focused in these areas.

Once again best of luck as your career develops..

Sorry for being so tardy in adding Foviance to the list (Thanks Matthew Todd) but decided (for once) to turn everything off whilst on holiday.

This is of course a huge opportunity for agencies like Foviance that combine quant/qual through the use of technology and methodology to drive conversion optimisation. I also think this combination offers genuine differentiation from tech only vendors and quant only vendors.

Too often conversion optimisation is seen as a hard and fast quantitative problem requiring a quantitative solution. We don't think it is exclusively so although clearly quant has a huge part to play - hence our acquisition of Applied Insights last year.

Understanding behaviour overlays a vital dimension; providing the "why" to the "what" that quant answers. This is increasingly understood as demonstrated by the list of agencies here and also Adrian from Google's note.