[tech, work] PSA re Web Design Jobs and a Career Opportunity
OK, as some of you know, I've been helping to hire some web design/production workers at my job. As part of this I've been interviewing people and reading other orgs' Craigslist ads and so forth.
So, right now I have a real good sense of the state of the labor market (at least here in Boston) for these things.
Right now -- and I'm pretty sure increasingly over at least the next year -- the demand for highly talented designers who are skilled in HTML+CSS is going through the roof.
I've started using the term "CSS ZenGardener", after the legendary CSS Zen Garden, "A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design", i.e. a showcase of artistry completely accomplished in CSS. A ZenGardener is to CSS as a Monk is to perl.
And I just saw someone else's ad mention ZenGarden.
ZenGardeners can punch their own tickets right now. The hourly price of ZenGardeners is going through the roof. And not just contract; the competition for ZenGardeners is fierce. (We came this close and were out-bid by $10k! And the other guys pretty much matched our fabulous benes. Arg.) Even quite junior Gardeners -- if their design acumen is at all there -- are in high demand.
Part of how you can tell is that experience requirements are disappearing from the job ads. Now, one would think/hope that companies would be more interested in whether someone can do the work than how long they'd been doing it for; after all, the later is a stand in for assessing the first. Nevertheless, HR departments around the world attempt to express requirements for skill in quantities of time, something which is not prohibitive of hiring (from the company's point of view) when labor is a buyers market. But it's one of the idiocies which gets weeded out of hiring ads when the hiring companies start realizing that, hey! it's really hard to find anyone who can do this work for any money.
If you are a person with design chops and a comfort hand-coding HTML, and you were trying to figure out a nice short-term career path to make lots of money, investing 60 hours of independent study into CSS and creating your own humble portfolio -- including a submission to the Zen Garden -- would probably turn out to be wildly profitable.
If you are a person with design chops who does HTML production with table layouts, you're pretty much unemployable.
This direction is being driven -- hard -- by the technical exigencies of Web 2.0 functionality, which pretty much demands rigorous XHTML+CSS design. As Web 2.0 and AJAX catch on -- and indeed they are catching on -- the market appetite for people who can do Web 2.0/AJAX/web application compatible graphic design and production is going to just keep going up.
Meanwhile, at the moment,
1) The labor pool is still flooded with web design and production people who don't know CSS, or have such rudimentary knowledge of it they don't know how to know if their design ideas are even feasible in CSS. As above, these people are getting to be nigh unhirable.
2) The majority of companies hiring still haven't quite caught on yet. The temp agencies get it. They're charging >$60/hr and paying >$30/hr for that skill set. True experts maybe more like $80/$40. But there's still clueless little firms offering $12/hr for these positions. I expect as everyone else has the lovely little learning experience we did, clues will be widely disseminated.
So, right now I have a real good sense of the state of the labor market (at least here in Boston) for these things.
Right now -- and I'm pretty sure increasingly over at least the next year -- the demand for highly talented designers who are skilled in HTML+CSS is going through the roof.
I've started using the term "CSS ZenGardener", after the legendary CSS Zen Garden, "A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design", i.e. a showcase of artistry completely accomplished in CSS. A ZenGardener is to CSS as a Monk is to perl.
And I just saw someone else's ad mention ZenGarden.
ZenGardeners can punch their own tickets right now. The hourly price of ZenGardeners is going through the roof. And not just contract; the competition for ZenGardeners is fierce. (We came this close and were out-bid by $10k! And the other guys pretty much matched our fabulous benes. Arg.) Even quite junior Gardeners -- if their design acumen is at all there -- are in high demand.
Part of how you can tell is that experience requirements are disappearing from the job ads. Now, one would think/hope that companies would be more interested in whether someone can do the work than how long they'd been doing it for; after all, the later is a stand in for assessing the first. Nevertheless, HR departments around the world attempt to express requirements for skill in quantities of time, something which is not prohibitive of hiring (from the company's point of view) when labor is a buyers market. But it's one of the idiocies which gets weeded out of hiring ads when the hiring companies start realizing that, hey! it's really hard to find anyone who can do this work for any money.
If you are a person with design chops and a comfort hand-coding HTML, and you were trying to figure out a nice short-term career path to make lots of money, investing 60 hours of independent study into CSS and creating your own humble portfolio -- including a submission to the Zen Garden -- would probably turn out to be wildly profitable.
If you are a person with design chops who does HTML production with table layouts, you're pretty much unemployable.
This direction is being driven -- hard -- by the technical exigencies of Web 2.0 functionality, which pretty much demands rigorous XHTML+CSS design. As Web 2.0 and AJAX catch on -- and indeed they are catching on -- the market appetite for people who can do Web 2.0/AJAX/web application compatible graphic design and production is going to just keep going up.
Meanwhile, at the moment,
1) The labor pool is still flooded with web design and production people who don't know CSS, or have such rudimentary knowledge of it they don't know how to know if their design ideas are even feasible in CSS. As above, these people are getting to be nigh unhirable.
2) The majority of companies hiring still haven't quite caught on yet. The temp agencies get it. They're charging >$60/hr and paying >$30/hr for that skill set. True experts maybe more like $80/$40. But there's still clueless little firms offering $12/hr for these positions. I expect as everyone else has the lovely little learning experience we did, clues will be widely disseminated.