Survey response

Sorry all for the lack of communication on my part. I'm in NY attending an annual advisory board meeting at my undergrad school.

To answer your question, we've had ~45 responses to day. That's great, but would love to see more (esp. considering our membership is > 1700).

Won't comment too much on the actual responses because I haven't gone through them all yet.

Thanks for the info... I was just looking for the quantity of responses at this point so your answer is perfect. Hopefully a bunch more people will respond. I am very interested to see what the data looks like when the sample size is larger.

Yes, absolutely. I just sent out a mid-week email, in part to solicit more responses for this survey. Hopefully we'll see many more replies in the next few days!

Absolutely - that's a great idea. I agree, and I think that more of these polls can really help us get a grip on the job market from various perspectives (recruiting, job seeker, HR, etc.)

Of course, the idea behind this particular survey was to get information that could help me put together a job fair. But that said, maybe we can brainstorm (right here) some other information which would benefit the entire community, and then create a survey out of it.

In other words, community-designed surveys of the community. I like the sound of that because the survey results are relevant to everyone by design.

Well, I think there are questions that could be asked for the "other side of the table" in what they'd like to see in a job fair too... But there are as you suggest a lot of other things that I think people would like to know.

Is there any way with the software here that users can create polls like on Yahoo groups? I'm not sure that is the best way to facilitate community participation, but perhaps we can brainstorm something that would? Anyone else out there have suggestions?

Just to update, we have 162 replies so far. That's about a 9% response rate. I've been told 10% is what to expect. But still....keep'em coming! I'm going to close the survey at the end of this week.

I have this crazy idea: We're all going to analyze the survey results and identify trends via some online discourse (of course, with all private data removed). A bunch of eyes are better than one. Social media at work!

Even with 10% of the base responding, we'll have some good data. But like any engineer, I'm after more data...

I think having community-generated and responded surveys ("social survey") can be really powerful on here.

So let's put this to the test. I'm going to create a survey for companies (well, staffers & recruiters) to assess their employment needs. What questions would you ask?

Here's my short list so far:

* Company name, contact info (no brainer)
* Industry (semi,hw,sw,IT,web, other with fill-in the blank box)
* Job opportunities available? If so, which ones (list all kinds of categories, from engineers, to sales & marketing, etc.)
* Skills sought? (fill in the blank - tags like "c++", ".NET", etc.)
* How many total tech job opportunities are available? (a number)
* Would attend a door64 job fair? y/n

I will put the stipulation that the jobs must be currently available for the filling; I may ask for proof. No fishing expeditions.

So what do you think I'm missing from the list?

I'd be interesting to know what they think of the current job market and what skills they think are in short supply... what skills there is more than ample supply of. Not quite sure how to put those into appropriate format for a survey like that...

We could ask a question similar to the "skills sought", but asking what skills are the toughest to find locally (again, another list of skills). Easily could ask the inverse question you posed in the same way.

No, that's an excellent idea SJ. I agree. One of the benefits of this community should be to keep up with the current state of our local tech job market. We all need to know where we're going so we can surf the wave versus drowning.

What is the number of responses up to now? Have we passed 10% participation yet?

For those who haven't responded yet, I think the deadline is approaching... I would encourage everyone to let your voice be heard!

We are at 9.34% (yes i used a calculator). That's 172 responses.

YES, PLEASE take the survey if you haven't already.

Nice job everyone: we're above 14% now! Keep it up!

Third-party recruiters should be excluded (or counted seperately) when counting "opportunities available".

I imagine that for every legitimate open engineering position in Austin, there must be at least a dozen third-party recruiters trying to earn a buck. (I know, they've got to eat, too.) Obviously, if we count them, our numbers will be way off.