Web Worker Daily

Independent web workers have many challenges to deal with, including deciding what technology to focus on. Make the wrong decision, and the market can leave you behind. Now job search engine SimplyHired has put together a little application to make guessing just a tiny bit easier. Their employment trends page lets you graph the number of job listings by keyword from their sizeable database over the past couple of years. Want to know whether perl or python is more popular with employers? Curious about whether it’s easier to telecommute in Boston or Atlanta? Type in a couple of search terms and find out.

Of course, you can’t take the data as absolute truth (after all, they don’t index every job opening, and the keyword you’re looking for might not even be in the ad for the perfect job for you), and for some niches the numbers are more noise than signal. But it’s certainly a more useful tool for picking hot markets than just guessing.

(Graph data provided by SimplyHired.com, a search engine for jobs.)