High-tech Job Survey Results
In preparation for the upcoming career fair & networking event (date and location TBD), I just finished running a two-week survey of door64 members to assess aspects of our local job market. We had 323 responses.
Instead of me trying to analyze all the data alone, and in the spirit of social media, I'm publishing the raw data for the community to analyze. I removed all private field data, and removed "bad" data (obvious duplicates when someone hit SUBMIT twice, no answer submissions, etc.)
Let's use this thread to discuss trends we find. Our conclusions will help me find the right employers to invite to the event.
Here's the raw data in Excel 2003 format. Please comment here (must be logged in)
If you're a high-tech employer in Central Texas who is interested in being a part of a tech job fair, please email me.
Only 44 with the highest level of job security is a bit alarming....
Ahh, I forgot to add a comment for Job security heading with the scale. Re-uploaded the spreadsheet with that information. It was:
If you are currently employed, enter your perceived level of job security. 1 means VERY LOW job security (can be laid off any day now), and 5 VERY HIGH job security (feel very secure).
I'm really surprised it is that high... If I was answering today instead of last week I'd personally have to answer the lowest rather than just the 2nd lowest based on what I found out on Friday...
Unfortunately I'm also not at all surprised at the fairly large number of people who aren't working and who have been looking for a while. That definitely goes against claims that there is a shortage of tech workers...
Folks seem to be finding work relatively easily.
Of those actively looking (148 total):
28 - 1 month or less,
59 - 1 to 3 months
35 - 3 to 6 months
15 - 6 to 12 months
9 - 1 to 2 years
2 - 2+ years
below is the bad ASCII bar chart, same data
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Seems to me most folks are finding work relatively quickly.
It would be interesting to have included questions so we could see how long people who are currently employed have been at their current job, and how long it took them to find that job.
I wouldn't draw that conclusion from that data... If its taking more than a month to find work, that isn't what I'd call "relatively easy", and the numbers that are 3+ months are still fairly significant.
FWIW, I personally answered "passively" looking because I gave up my active search a while back. If I were to answer it today though, I'd be back to "active" because of what I found out about my job security last week. I've been at my current job for over 5 years, but I've been looking for something better for about as long. Actually I lowered my standards to something even close to what I have now provided it would have better future potential, which wouldn't take much. I may have to lower my standards to "whatever I can get" over the next year or so.
Unfortunately, there are way too many people around Austin who while working are "underemployed". There are quite a few people who used to work in IT who have taken "throw away" jobs in other fields or even low-end jobs like retail just to get by. There are also lots of people who are working in lower end IT jobs than they are qualified for such as people who used to be senior developers who are working PC tech, help desk or QA due to lack of better opportunity. There are also lots of people who are working temp jobs and short term contracts, often at fairly low rates and without benefits because they can't find the kind of permanent employment they'd like. A lot of people who've been laid off from big employers like Dell end up stuck in this boat.
(Here's a start)
Jobs sought:
0.6% Product Manager
0.9% Programming
1.2% Hardware
1.2% Recruiting
1.5% Technical Writing
2.1% Support
2.4% Software Engineer
2.7% Web
7.5% Project Manager
8.0% Marketing
11% Engineering
61% Other
Wow, 61% other???? I wonder what is comprised of that number? Interesting how many people are looking for Marketing jobs (I wonder what they think marketing involves?). Also, you did not put in sales or technical sales, business development, or operations (all which could use engineering / technical degrees).
Hi!
61% were various other jobs sought but that were such a low percentage (in a very diverse list) that it would have taken a lot of time to go through them all. (You can see what I mean if you look at the spreadsheet details.) This is why I said "a start." I looked through the excel spreadsheet because I was interested to see which jobs were the most sought after.
I think that this would be easier to look at if we had given everyone a bulleted list of choices and then included "other." With so many names for the same job, it takes more time (than I care to spend) to go through it all.
I totally agree with you, I was surprised to see how many were looking at Marketing jobs. Very interesting!
I hope we get more response next time we do the survey, it is interesting to see what everyone is up to!
What evidence do you have
on that?
softwarejanitor, you said
Unfortunately, there are way too many people around Austin who while working are "underemployed".
How do you know this? My personal experience doesn't bear this out. Yours might. But unless you know of a representative survey, I don't think either of us should make statements about the current rate of underemployment.
Well, I can't quantify it beyond anecdotal evidence, but I all too frequently run into people out and about town who are ex-techies that are now doing things like wearing an orange apron at Home Depot. From what I've seen Austin probably has some of the highest qualified, best educated wait and bar tending staff in the country. It is frequent that when I wear a geek t-shirt around town I will get comments from ex-ITers. I also personally know a number of people who have taken IT jobs below their qualification level in order to make ends meet. Worst were guys I know who used to be full timers at Dell who got laid off and then re-hired through one of the temp agencies to do essentially the same work for a fraction of the pay and w/o benefits. Compared to those guys I consider myself lucky, but I still make less money in real dollars now than I did before the crash let alone inflation adjusted dollars and I'm working in a dead-end boring job with no future and no opportunities to "stay current".
What is your experience? I'd like to hear what you have to say even if its just your opinion. Maybe if we do another survey around here we can add questions that are relevant to this particular issue?
In general if people disagree with me I would like to hear how they think I'm wrong... I welcome differences of opinion and/or documented facts that shed illumination on these subjects. On a lot of these job market related topics I'd really like someone to convince me I'm wrong or better yet prove me wrong. I'd be more than happy to settle for ideas on how the community can work towards making the job market better for all of us.
When you look at the numbers from the survey as to how long active seekers have been looking this way it doesn't seem to encouraging:
Over 40% of active seekers have been looking for over 3 months.
I'd be more comfortable saying that people were having success finding work quickly if that number were much smaller.
To be honest as well, I was actually a bit surprised that almost 1/3 of survey responses were from people who are not working and actively seeking. Given the relatively small sample size, if this survey even close to representative of the general IT worker population in the area, it means there must still be thousands of unemployed techies around here. I was expecting 10% or less of respondents to be unemployed, especially given the (admittedly I believe to be bogus) government unemployment numbers being down around 5% unemployment. They even claim that techies have lower than the general average unemployment, which doesn't seem to be true.
I don't have any statistical evidence of what softwarejanitor said, but I know of people who accepted jobs below their "expected" level, just to stay in Austin because it is such a nice place to live!
I do as well. I also know several people who were forced to relocate to places where the job market is better such as Houston or DFW (or even worse places to live) because they couldn't find adequate employment here. I occasionally get inquiries from ex-pats who are looking to return here if they can find a good job, but other than pointing them at the job section here I usually can't offer them much assistance.
So the first thing I'm doing is sorting by Looking for employment, and then Primary Background, and looking at positions sought. (In retrospect, Hardware & Semiconductors might have been grouped together.)
OK, what looks prevalent in each category? I started creating a grouping based on their Position Sought.
Semiconductors + Hardware: 74 data points.
Engineering / Design 46%
Marketing or sales 19%
Program Mgmt 15%
Management / Leadership 12%
Support / service 5%
Tech Writer 3%
Information Technology: 54 data points.
Management / Lead 26%
Program Mgmt 16%
IT Admin / Engineer 14%
Marketing or sales 8%
Business analyst 7%
Programmer 3%
Software + Web: 68 data points.
Engineer 30%
Management 26%
Marketing or sales 15%
Web developer 9%
Tech writer / trainer 5%
Embedded SW Eng. 4%
Program Mgmt 3%
For this aggregation, I didn't consider responses of people who are not looking for employment. Only candidates who are ACTIVELY and PASSIVELY looking did I categorize & count.
Also, embedded SW engineers can easily fit in the Semiconductor / Hardware category, but I left them categorized under software.
Don't forget we have a sample bias -- probably a greater-than-average number of people on Door64 are looking for jobs or at least "opportunities" and also certain types of folks tend to respond to surveys.
~ Ms. G
Yet Another Austin Wierdo