Career Ideas On Using Career Sites

Scanning through the postings to get a feel for your viability is a good idea.

Later tonight, I'll post an outline for a book I have in mind.. sort of a protocol/modus operandi for you tech career. I wanted to write this idea down while it's fresh.

One of the steps I would suggest people in the tech careers to take is to constantly look through a job board. Preferrably one geared for your local area (assuming you have some fondness for your local area and are not willing to move to another far away state or muncipality). Try to get a constant feel for the jobs out there and the skills required to do those jobs. Which job descriptions sound good to you? Do you have those skills? For me, I use this as a roadmap for what skills I need to develop. It's not the whole answer but part of a protocol.

I've been in data warehousing for many years now. It's mostly about the art/science of taking data, slicing/dicing it, and coming up with some meaningful information/knowledge. Also, Lately I've been buying a lot of the Hacks books from Orielly. One particular book I started thumbing through was Spidering Hacks. You know what they say... When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail. When your major tool is data warehousing, everything becomes a data mart. I came up with an idea for spidering a local job site for jobs in my area and turning it into a data mart. However, the devil is in the details so I will just describe the end result I had in mind.

I'd like an application that sucks in data from a job site and gives me sort of a heartbeat for whether or not my career is on track. I would search for a keyword DATA WAREHOUSE. I'm pretty set on sticking here since still have to work on my cred as an Architect/Project Manager type and my Java skills couldn't match up to a college kid with a year of good experience. I'd keep a couple of reports and build some alerts. One alert would be, if the number of jobs for data warehousing falls 25%, warn Anthony that he's screwed. I might have a histogram on how many jobs listed skill X or skill Y.

There's a few problems with the job postings that require human mediation. One issue is that a lot of headhunter types post for the same jobs using slightly different descriptions. You could think there were 10 jobs out there when there are really only 4. The other issue is for some reason, the job sites are letting unrelated postings into your search. I saw several for WORK AT HOME careers. I looked and the job had nothing to do with Data Warehousing.

Until there is more structure to the postings (i.e. XML data sets), this idea is probably not feasible. However, remember that scanning through the postings to get a feel for your viability is a good idea.