Knowing Your Job Market
Knowing Your Job Market
At any point in your career, it is important to understand the job market and what your opportunities are. Knowing your what's out there for you can help with decisions and get the most out of your career.
What is your job market?
Your job market to refer to the set of opportunities specific to you. This is defined by factors like:
- Current and target job title
- Job experience (years and types)
- Job type (contract, full time)
- Location or where you're willing to relocate
- Desired pay
- Industries of interest
- Non-negotiable and negotiable benefits
- Any other criteria that either includes or eliminates jobs for you
You have to introspect and self-evaluate to define your job market by jobs you can reasonably get rather than desirable jobs a little out of reach. This is important to give you a realistic view of opportunities and increase your chances of success for your next career move.
Don't be afraid to reach though! You can always test the waters by applying to those positions and see what bites. You may find that you underestimated yourself.
Why it matters to know your job market
Knowing your job market helps you make career decisions. You can know how many opportunities there are and how quickly they're going to get an idea of how long a job hunt would be if you started now.
In addition to a sense of how quickly you could get a job, you can also decide if your job market is too small and you need to revisit your criteria.
Having this information can help you answer critical questions like:
- Can I get a job with better pay and benefits?
- Do I have enough money to quit my job and find a job within X months?
- Should I stay and work on a promotion or get a promotion through a new job?
- If I look for a new job, will I have to move?
- What skills do I need to focus on to become a more competitive candidate?
With some of these decisions, it really helps to have at least several months of planning before your job hunt. You can plan your rainy-day fund (or f*** you fund), decide to take a course, or start looking at cities where you’d be willing to move.
Even if you’re not planning to look for a new job, understanding your market can give you leverage in your current position. If you can easily find a comparable or better job, you’ll know you can push for more in your current position whether it is pay or career progression.
Tracking your job market
A lot of the benefits of knowing your job market come in when you are regularly checking in on your job market. If you suddenly have to find a job, you’ll be finding out the good or bad news about your market during a time of stress. Being able to take that AI course or save your rainy-day fund can make a big difference.
Tracking your job market doesn’t have to be a lot of work. You can check on your job market every 3 to 6 months with an hour or two of work to get the benefit of being able to plan ahead for your career.
Techniques for tracking your market:
- Use tools like levels.fyi and Payscale to evaluate pay ranges for your skills and years of experience
- Use job board like Glassdoor and LinkedIn to find specific jobs you can apply for with job searching tools
- Use job boards to set up job alerts for your specific criteria and scan the update emails for a general sense of the market
- Keep your professional profiles up to date to see how often recruiters are reaching out and what types of jobs they are sharing
- Pay attention to people in your network or team changing jobs and where they’re going - optionally reaching out to ask about their job hunt
- Use tools like TrueUp for industry trends around layoffs and growing sectors
- Interact with your network or attend career fairs to find out which companies are investing in hiring
Note that I use these tools to keep an eye on my job market in tech. There may be better tools out there for your specific industry or job interests.
If you think you'll be looking for a job in the next 6 months, I recommend checking in more frequently such as monthly or weekly.
Always be Interviewing
I’ve heard the advice many times that you should always be interviewing - once or twice a year - to keep your skills sharp. This lets you test out your resume and the types of companies looking to hire you. This strategy works well to give you certainty about whether you could get a job at the specific point in time you're looking. It also tells you your interview preparedness and gives you a heads up to any changing interviewing trends.
That being said, it is time consuming and takes a lot of work. You can still get the benefits of knowing your job market without interviewing and you can always be applying.
As you check in on your job market, you can brush the dust off your resume and apply to a couple of jobs in your market to test the waters. If you get a positive response right away, that can already tell you a lot. Maybe you talk to the recruiter to learn more about the interview expectations, maybe you do the first phone screen: all of this can give you more information.
For me, I find applying and going through the recruiter call to learn about the interview process, pay range, and benefits gives me the most useful information and all I have to do is add a few bullets to my resume and have a 30 min phone call. No need to always be interviewing.
Arm yourself with information!
The more information you have, the better decisions you can make. I encourage you to find the right routine for tracking your market to always know your value and career options, whether that's deleting your job alerts after a quick look or doing first round interviews every 6 months.
Happy job hunting and good luck!
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