Web Worker Daily

Photo by _e.t.

I left my corporate job in June to strike out on my own as a freelance consultant working out of my home office and coffee shops. I had been preparing to make the move for a while, and it was something that I knew I wanted to try. The technology industry was growing and there were plenty of job openings in my field of expertise: online communities and social media. I left confident that I had plenty of time to test the waters as a freelance web worker knowing that I could always go back to the corporate world if freelance consulting didn’t work out for me.

I’m happy to say that consulting is working well for me right now, because I’m no longer confident that I could find a new corporate job as quickly or easily as I might have been able to get one a year ago.

The job market is getting tougher each month as unemployment continues to rise. At this point, I should emphasize that I am not an economist, employment guru or other expert qualified to analyze this data, so consider this just one web worker’s summary of the current economic conditions.

Let’s start with the recent employment data. Grim and depressing are the best ways I could come up with to describe the employment data that was released on Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor. Here are a few “highlights” from the report:

• Unemployment rose from 6.8 percent in November to 7.2 percent in December.
• The number of unemployed people in the U.S. is now 11.1 million up by 632,000 in December
• From the beginning of the recession in December 2007, unemployment has increased by 2.3 percent with 3.6 million additional people becoming unemployed.

However, this may not tell the whole story for those of us in various web working professions. Read the rest of this entry »