Job Browsing In The Spring Time.
The internet and job sites make it easier to guage your ability to find another job. The spring time is a good time to job browse. This is traditionally because companies set their budgets for the year to fund new positions in spring. Here's some things I've do and an idea I am having.
Well, I've got a defined nitch and I look for jobs in that nitch. I specialize in data warehousing , ETL/data extraction , and can stretch to data modeling. For me, there's no sense in looking for jobs like a Java programmer where I only qualify at a junior level. Especially in the spring, I search through the number of available jobs in my area. I'm kinda settled in my house and there's really now reason to move out of the Philadelphia area. Tech is growing here. I use jobcircle.com because it's more localized and can tell you approximate number of miles positions are from your house. Luckily, I live near the city and King of Prussia. These are two areas with a good number of tech employers. My own town, Conshohocken, is also growing. It's more of a startup incubator corridor.
An ex-coworker and friend, Bill Hanisak, once said that he'd sweep floors at McDonald's if necessary to feed his kids. By September, I'll have 2 kids and I feel the same way. I didn't splurge on an expensive house so even a lower salary for someone in my skill set would keep things a float. I search through available jobs to keep a pulse on what's out there and to know that before I go through our emergency savings, there's a good chance that I could find a job with sufficient salary.
Right now, it's a manual process. It would be nice if I could come up with enough data parsing rules to parse the job reqs out there and place them in a visual guage. Maybe I could have an alert system. If 0 - 2 job reqs were found, that would be a red alert. One issue is that one job req can be marketed by several recruiting firms. You'd need to set some rules to determine if the 10 reqs you found were really only 2 reqs marketed by 5 different recruiters. You could put together a few tools like this and open a web services site for tech professionals.
