Examining the Current Writing Job Market (Part One)

John Hewitt — Sat, 01 May 2010 06:01:08 +0000

Finding a job is like playing bingo. It helps when the numbers are in your favor. Photo courtesy or my wife, Jennifer Hewitt.

As someone who posts writing jobs almost daily (jobs.poewar.com) I often notice trends in the job market. I see which job titles are generating a lot of new listings and which job titles are scarce. I also see the other end. I know which types of job titles are getting a lot of traffic on my site and which ones are languishing despite the number of openings. I think this information is interesting, so I thought I would share. Perhaps it can help you in your job search.

Note: When I discuss the number of listings for a position, I am referring to the number of listings I find on the job aggregator, Indeed.com. I am not referring to the number of listings on my site. I sift through the positions I find (on Indeed.com and elsewhere) and try to list the best opportunities.

Technical Writing

Technical Writing is an interesting place to start. There are currently about three thousand technical writing positions listed on the job search aggregator I use. Now, some of those listings are duplicates, so any number should be taken with a grain of salt, but this is a good projection when compared with other job titles. Three thousand listings are by far the most you will find for any specific job title in the writing field. Editing has more job titles, but it is a much broader category as you will see below. On my site, however, technical writing positions are not searched for as heavily as other positions. In fact, they place sixth among my job categories (eighth if you count Write from Home and Freelance Writing). I think this is due in part to the barrier to entry for this field. It does require demonstrable technical skill, and that scares job seekers away. For those who have the qualifications though, technical writing offers the most jobs per seeker â€“ at least on my site.

Write from Home

Write from Home is the most popular category on my site. It isn’t a job title, so much as a job goal, which is what makes it so attractive. On the downside, it is hard for me to come up with positions for this category that don’t sound too scammy. The dream of writing from home is obtainable, but it isn’t easy and you are not going to find a lot of businesses lined up to make you this offer. Most of the write from home listings I do come across are freelance opportunities. In those cases I do list the jobs in both the write from home and freelance writing categories.

Proofreading

The most viewed specific job title on my site (leaving out Write from Home and Freelance Writing) is Proofreading. I don’t have a full explanation for why, but plenty of people come to my site looking for proofreading jobs. On the job availability front, proofreading jobs have a modest number of listings. Less than two hundred proofreader jobs are currently listed on the aggregator. This is a reasonable number, but far from an explosive job market. This tells me that the amount of interest in the job exceeds the amount of available jobs, but that there are opportunities out there.

Editing

Editing is the second most trafficked job title on my site. It is true that proofreading is a form of editing, but I leave that out of the general editor positions. Editor positions are plentiful (there are 3700 listings on the aggregator) but it is a wide category. A technical editor, for example, requires a much different skill set than an acquisitions editor or a managing editor. There are also many editor positions I don’t list such as film and video editors. Â Still, there are opportunities out there for editors, and they seem relatively on par with the number of seekers. Here is a quick breakdown of some of the editing subcategories in terms of the aggregate listings:

Writer / Editor: 421
Technical Editor: 200
Copy Editor: 176
Web Editor: 73
News Editor: 72
Assignment Editor: 60
Acquisitions editor: 13
Sports Editor: 13
Book Editor: 4

Blogging and Web Content

Blogging is the third ranked job title on the site. There are plenty of people looking for these positions. Unfortunately, the number of listings out there doesn’t really support the interest. There are about three hundred current blogger opportunities, and the category is filled with listings that offer little or no money. It is a hard category to sift through if you are looking for good positions.

I also list Web Content Jobs and those listings do not get nearly as much traffic as blogger jobs. In fact, the category gets less than half the traffic that the blogger category gets. I find this interesting because I can locate a far greater number of legitimate web content jobs than I can blogger jobs. There are close to a thousand positions and while there are still some very low paying listings, there are many more good paying positions here than in my blogger listings.

Job Category Popularity Rankings

For those who are curious, here are the job categories on my site, in order from most to least popular.

I will continue discussing job titles and opportunities in my next post. I’ll discuss copywriting, freelance writing, and social media jobs among other topics.