Ah, the noughties. A simpler time when you’d find us in our bootcut jeans, flicking through printed recruitment lists while twirling the curly cord of the office landline and waiting for the dial tone.

If you’ve been in fieldwork research since then, you’ll know one thing for sure: a lot has changed.

Twenty years ago, the hottest debate in the office was probably whose turn it was on the fax machine. Fast forward to today, and the whole industry is talking about automation, APIs, and AI tools that can screen, segment, and schedule faster than you can say “quota full.”

So, to celebrate twenty years of Acumen, let’s take a quick (and slightly nostalgic) stroll down memory lane.

The Early 2000s: Clipboards, Coffee and (a little) Chaos

The golden age of paper diaries and printouts. When “going into field” literally meant going into field. Recruitment lists and interview guides were scribbled by hand, and the words “last-minute replacement” could send an entire team into meltdown.

Spreadsheets were revolutionary. Email chains ran into the hundreds. And if someone told you they’d found respondents on social media, you’d have probably asked, “What’s MySpace?”

It was a hands-on, highlighter-heavy era, and the foundations of modern market research fieldwork were laid right there.

The 2010s: Enter Digital

It’s hard to believe how much changed in ten years. Goodbye fax machine, hello digital everything, from online panels to mobile surveys. Seemingly overnight, we could suddenly reach respondents, faster, cheaper and across continents. Follow-ups no longer meant chasing with a phone call (though we all secretly missed the curly cord).

It was also a decade of experimentation. Webcam interviews? Sure. Online focus groups? Why not. A survey that works on BlackBerry? Yeah…maybe not.

And yet, while technology made life easier, it also made expectations higher. Clients wanted more, faster. And respondents expected smoother research experiences – maybe to make up for the lack of biscuits in the digital world.

Today: Tech-Savvy and Human Centred

Now, we live in a world of data, dashboards and delightfully complicated workflows. CRM systems talk to recruitment tools. Fieldwork lives in ‘the cloud’ not just the field. And if you mention doing something ‘manually’, some youthful whizz will probably have automated it for you by lunchtime.

But behind it all, it’s still people.

Behind the dashboards and smart tech are the teams who keep projects moving, who calm nerves when respondents ghost, and who somehow manage to get 20 hard-to-reach professionals on a Teams call before 9am.

The tools may have changed, but the essence of great qualitative and quantitative research hasn’t. It’s still about building trust, solving problems, and making sure even the quietest voice is heard.

Here’s to the Next 20 Years

If the last two decades have taught us anything, it’s that change happens and often at pace. The fieldwork of the future might involve predictive analytics, voice recruitment or AI screeners, but it still needs real humans who get it, manage it, and make it happen.

Because fieldwork will always be people work, no matter how advanced the tools become.

So, here’s to another twenty years of learning, levelling up and laughter along the way.