That’s what we set out to explore (and decorate with pretty graphs) in our new article, succinctly titled Job Trends. Go there now.

Are you currently building web-based applications? Are you tasked with adding more interactivity to your web applications? Do you want to learn interaction design skills geared towards adding interactivity and richness to your web-based solutions?

As we manage more information, there is greater need for us to use more complex interactions to guide us through finding, selecting, creating, acting upon, sharing, and finally consuming the information around us. Whether through a web browser, an Adobe AIR application, or your cell phone, rich interactions can aid your users and provide differentiated value to the businesses that engage you.

The intent of this class is two-fold. First and foremost it is a course in interaction design methods and practices that will guide you regardless of what mediums you work with in your future. Second, we will look at how you can apply these skills to the particular technical and behavioral issues surrounding the design and development of RIAs.

Some problems you will be able to solve when done with this class:

1. You will work on the redesign of a mission-critical financial services application to be rolled out to 6,000+ financial consultants. The previous system was deployed as a desktop installed application using .NET services. You are tasked with redesigning it to work within a web browser. What is the right set of technologies to consider? What are the differences? How do I and should I replicate the behaviors of the desktop application in this new medium? What pitfalls should I be aware of when working on my design?
2. You are hired to design a hotel reservation system for the latest brand hotel to come from a major hospitality organization famous for top tier service. What advantages are there in using RIA behaviors and technologies to help enhance this new brand? What can go wrong to cause a backlash effect?

To help designers with these types of problems, expert interaction designer David Malouf has created a seminar and studio course exploring some of the most important issues surrounding the web’s most sophisticated applications. You will not only get a solid understanding of the intricacies and insights into RIAs, but you will also learn how to become a top-notch technology agnostic interaction designer, so when you are tasked with mobile, ubiquitous, or desktop application design issues you’ll be ready for those tasks as well.

This course will teach you:

1. What defines an RIA, its building blocks, the environment and the differing and complementary technologies.
2. How to deconstruct existing applications to learn important lessons from those that came before you.
3. How to guide in the selection of technologies, and to make your designs more technologically agnostic.
4. Learn the core principles of interaction design practice: sketching, prototyping, and refinement.
5. What is “studio” work and why it leads to better designs.
6. What are design patterns and how they can help you over time increase design quality and consistency when used properly.

The course will take place across eight weeks of classes. Each week, the class time will be split between seminar lectures and studio/discussion time. Between each week students will be expected to do homework which will consist of design work as well as reading material. This is a treated as a post-graduate college level course for motivated and passionate students who want to learn through participation.

Our industry grows and changes at rapid clip, so keeping our knowledge and skills up-to-date is key to getting and keeping jobs we enjoy. So how should we decide what to learn? I’d say we should focus on the intersection of three areas:

1. Doing what makes us happy
2. Doing what we do well
3. Doing what the market will pay us to do

Only you know what makes you happy. And reflecting on your past work performance will shed light on what activities you do better than others.

So that leaves us asking, what will the market pay us to do? Ideally we would know which skills have consistent job demand over time, as well as which ones are growing quickly. We can come close to this data using this nifty job trends feature from Indeed, a meta job search engine that searches thousands of websites. Indeed’s trends feature can graph which areas have more classified job ads. For example…

Social media is very strong, matching 4,993 job postings in the U.S.

Search engine optimization skills, matching 2,926 postings, are exploding relative to other online marketing skills.

Relatively speaking, mobile jobs are growing faster than the web…

Information architecture, at 26,273 postings, shows consistent strength…

But interaction design, with 4,414 postings, is spiking upwards with over 125% growth.

Oracle (108,919 postings) and SQL Server (70,521) dominate the database landscape…

…but MySQL (12,573 postings) has a growth rate of over 100% and climbing.

AJAX (16,512 postings) is catching up with Flex (19,779).

And while the Microsoft server-side scripting languages are dominating now (there’s 38,732 C# postings)…

…Ruby is exploding in popularity. There’s only 3,954 postings now, but with a growth rate over 650% it’s catching up.

Which interactive agencies are hiring? More job postings in this case could hide different situations: high growth, high employee turnover, favoring ads over other recruiting methods, and/or a weak network from which to recruit.

Ask yourself what career choices you should be making, then generate your own graph to see if the market for jobs helps sway your decision.

Thank you to Austin Govella, Lou Rosenfeld, Perry Hewitt, and Matthew Milan for feedback on this article.