January/February 2005 | Home

Employment News

Mel Cox by Mel Cox
EBSTC Co-Manager of Employment

As part of my personal job search, I am a member of a few different email “groups” that send out job postings. It is possible to subscribe and receive email notification either in a digest form (one email a day with all of that day’s listings), or individually (many emails per day). Personally, I prefer to get the individual emails because I’m able to keep more current on job listings, and also because the digest form usually strips out any attachments that might be included.

Currently, the number of job postings seems to be down from what I was seeing six months ago. That seems to be especially true of technical writing jobs. Previously, I was able to pass on as many as ten or more openings for technical writers per week. Lately, that number has dropped by about half. I am also seeing fewer postings on such venerable sites as CareerBuilder and Craigslist. And the postings I do see are extremely specific as to the skills and experience required.

One of the emails I received forwarded the following report from East Bay Works dated November 2004.

Employment and Unemployment of Residents (of the Bay Area)

“Note: The data used in all of this report on employment and industry analysis is not seasonally adjusted.

All three major Metropolitan Service Area's (MSA's) in the Bay Area continued to see a decline in unemployment rates, reaching 4.9% for the East Bay, 4.2% (San Francisco) and 5.3% (San Jose) in October 2004. This compares to 5.6% for California and 5.1% for the nation during the same period. The unemployment rate was 5.2% in Alameda County and 4.4% in Contra Costa County.

The East Bay and San Francisco's decline came despite increases in their labor forces. However, San Jose, though showing signs of leveling off, continues to lose its workforce, losing 18,400 from October 2003 to October 2004 and a total of 61,300 since October 2002. The East Bay is the only one to have increased employment (by 15,600) between October 2001 and October 2004, with 27,300 more employed in the last 12 months. San Francisco added 20,700 and San Jose experienced an increase of 4,700 during the last 12 months.”

So while it looks like we are making some gains in employment in both San Francisco and the East Bay, in San Jose/Silicon Valley, the major employment location for technology workers and therefore the major employment location for technical communicators, we are still losing jobs.

The employment outlook for those of us in the technical communications field remains bleak. This is not a comforting sign as we move into the holiday season and the new year. The best news seems to be that housing prices are up, and that those of us who are fortunate enough to own our homes could probably sell them for enough profit to move away from the Bay Area and buy another house outright somewhere else.

The full text of the report cited above, and other monthly and quarterly reports, may be viewed at the East Bay Monthly.

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