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| CURRENT SECTION :: Market Reports | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
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Ever willing to comply with requests, I’ve been asked to look at the market from the point of view of Technical Authors (TAs). For those of you who aren’t aware, the TA is the strange, silent person who sits in the corner, cursed forever to take the fag packets, post-it notes, and random doodles on flipcharts that constitute the average technical design document and turn them into something cohesive and legible. This probably explains why they’re so weird. I’ve never met a normal TA and, believe me – I’ve known a few – although not all of them in the biblical sense. Anyway, TAs should, I hope, be cheered by the fact that monthly postings for TA contracts have almost doubled in 2004. In October last year, there were fewer than 4,500 contracts available. In February this year, there were over 8,600 postings and March looks set to exceed that. In your job searches, do remember to put “TA or Technical Author” because otherwise you might miss a few postings. Talking of missing postings, I would suggest avoiding putting anything like “Pagemaker”, “FrameMaker”, “Acrobat” or “Quark” in your search criteria. And definitely avoid “Ventura” or “Creator2”. Really, really, really. The postings for TAs that include these keywords rarely reach double figures. As for rates, a standard technical author can expect to get an average of £30/hr. This hasn’t really moved over the last six months. And again, including the skills mentioned above will not be advantageous – and will reduce your rate to around £15/hr or less. FrameMaker occasionally appears offering a rate of around £28/hr but there haven’t been any postings for the last two months. Quark skills are constantly in demand, but the rate hovers around the £13/hr mark. In London, requirements for TAs have been growing very well, from 640 postings in September last year, to 2,500 last month. This month looks like it’s going to continue the growth in demand, having received over 2,100 postings already. In the UK generally there were over 7,000 postings. Scotland has also seen a boom, from 80 contracts in September to over 300 in February. Wales is also seeing an increase in requirements, although it’s only in double figures. In Ireland, after a small peak in January, Technical Authors have not been in great demand – which is a shame. Now for the really hot news: WebAlertz, via their sister companies ServAlertz.com and theStatz.com, have been monitoring job sites for the last eight months and have been notifying users almost instantly of new jobs or contracts that have been posted that match what they’re looking for. During this time, research has been ongoing to try to improve the service provided to our users. Job searching is still highly competitive and we want to do the best for our clients. To this end, we have developed a new heuristic engine that analyses the postings that are made from jobsites and anticipates where demand will lie. For example, VB, C++ and Java have all seen a doubling in postings over the last couple of months, although C++ seems to have hit a bit of a dip at the end of February. However C++ is currently offering £42/hr compared to £36/hr for VB or Java (strangely, there was a contract for someone with Jave [sic] experience in November but it was only worth £17/hr). So our engine can now extrapolate from our data and predict rates and demand intelligently. What is more, an analytical process monitors the success or failure of the predictions and adjusts the algorithms accordingly. Admittedly, it is only able to forecast a few hours into the future at the moment, but it is anticipated that as we collect more data we will be able to predict requirements for a day or two ahead. For those of you who want to know the technical details, our new engine analyses our data using Advanced Pre-emptive Real-time Interpolating Logic. We’ve had to develop a new programming language to do this, as none of the existing languages was able to fulfil our requirements. In deference to Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, the inventor of the Fourier Transformation theories which we have incorporated into our syllogistic analysis tools, we have called it Fourier’s Object Oriented Language. The result is that we will be able to notify you of upcoming contracts before the agency posts them. Think of the advantages this will give you. You will be able to tailor your CV and have it waiting, ready for when that particular contract appears on the jobsite. Alternatively, you could call the agent in advance to present your skills to them. Imagine their surprise when you call them moments after they’ve received a new requirement and long before they would have posted it! In the future we hope to make this facility available to agencies too, so that they can prepare a set of CVs and call their clients, safe in the knowledge that they will be addressing a requirement that the client hadn’t realised they wanted until the agent pointed it out to them. Naturally, this technology is not cheap and will only be available to a handful of agencies, otherwise its competitive advantage will be diluted. If you’re interested, please contact sales@webalertz.com. Testing is still ongoing (you can imagine how difficult it is to test a product like this) but we hope to get a version out to beta testers in the next few weeks. If you want to be a beta tester, please contact betatest@webalertz.com. Finally, the Tray Game. This was introduced to me by a Technical Author I got to know when I was working at The Stock Exchange in 1987. The aim of the game was that you had to be the first to hit your opponent over the head with a tray. The rules were that (a) the hitting could only happen once a day; (b) you could not actually injure the recipient of the tray bashing; (c) you could not stop the tray bearer from hitting you, and (d) you could not wreak revenge. It was a great game. Imagine walking up to someone drinking outside a pub on a sunny July day and then smashing down a metal tray on their head and watching the looks of incredulity and amazement from his friends when the recipient of the tray smashing just turns around, shrugs, and then says “you win.” It’s time to resurrect the tray game! I look forward to watching tray smashing happening all over the place! Sanity – well, relative sanity, will return next week. And this time it will be an analysis of the financial markets. Until then, enjoy April Fool’s Day, and keep in touch. Alan alan.potter@webalertz.com www.webalertz.com Apr 1, 2004 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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