Ask HN: Your favorite method of finding out demand for a particular skillset?

[vijayr]

Say you are deciding what to learn next and have a list of 4-5 topics to choose from. What is your favorite method of finding out

1. If there are jobs (fulltime and freelance) in your area, for those skillsets?

2. What kind of jobs you can expect (govt, research, academic etc)?

3. Compensation

etc.

[insoluble]

Although it may not necessarily reflect those technologies where you can expect the greatest pay rates, searching freelance marketplaces (Elance, oDesk, Guru, et cetera) for topic-specific keywords can give you an idea of the general market demand of current for those topics. For area specificity, pay attention to the locations of the clients. Craigslist and other job sites can work for researching by region. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm) has some broad-level information on pay rates per area (in the US) for specific job positions, but this may not have the granularity you seek.

[vijayr → insoluble]

I wonder if making a formal tool for this would make sense. You punch in some parameters like skillset, city name etc and the tool would search job sites etc and give a score.

[insoluble → vijayr]

In theory such a tool could be useful, but I would be worried about the usage restrictions imposed by the various sites. For example, many if not most freelance marketplaces are particularly concerned with any significant information about the jobs being made available outside of the official sites. Also, jobs can be posted as semi-public where they can be viewed only when logged in. To remain legal, it would be necessary to consult carefully each source site's EULA.

It would be very important to give a median score rather than a mean score. A resilient range, such as from quartile 1 (Q1) to quartile 3 (Q3) could be useful as well to mitigate outliers.

Another curiosity would be a map showing a colour gradient for the scores. I could see such a map being in popular reference.