Job Trends
What can the classifieds tell us about where to focus our career development?
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:
- Doing what makes us happy
- Doing what we do well
- 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.