Web Content Strategy Jobs on the Rise

The job site SimplyHired.com has some great tools that let you track market hiring trends. I ran an analysis to see how often the phrase "Content Strategist" appeared across all job boards that they index. The resulting graph is very interesting!

Content Strategist trends

Content Strategist jobs

First, it shows that online ads for content strategists for 2008 are up 21 percent from 2007. Even more interesting is that there appears to be a repeating hiring cycle with heavy hiring in May-July, then fairly flat for the rest of the year.

Now that I've thought about this pattern for a while, it makes perfect sense. With fresh new yearly budgets in hand, clients kick off a lot of new project activity in January. Requesting bids and getting proposals back takes a month or two, followed by another month of negotiations before the contracts are actually signed. So it makes sense that Web design agencies, and in-house development staffs would start to identify staffing shortfalls and begin placing ads in May once he new projects have started development. My experience is that content strategist openings require a lot of interviewing and take a while to fill. So it looks like most of these ads run through June and start to get pulled down in early July.

There is a lot of good news in the graph. It's great to know that the category as a whole is growing. More and more companies must be convinced of the overall benefit that having a content strategist on a project brings. Also, it's great to see that there is this repeating hiring cycle. If you are thinking of moving into content strategy or moving to a new agency, it looks like late May or early June would be the optimum time to bargain for the best hiring package.

I'll be watching to see if the content strategist hiring cycle continues into 2009. It's obvious that the hiring spike that started in May 2008, is much larger than the spike that started in May 2007. If the U.S. economy starts to pick up in 2009, the May 2009 spike could be even larger. It would be a great time to be selling your content strategy skills.

Visit the Content Strategy Job Board.