Job Word Cloud Redux: The AS/400 Sees Some Improvement

Published: July 7, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A few weeks ago, in a story entitled Reader Feedback on Forget About Platforms, Let's Talk About Jobs, I gathered up some job posting data from three of the big job sites in the United States--Dice, CareerBuilder, and Monster--as jobs related to programming languages and operating system platforms. Some readers offered me some suggestions for improving my searches, and I requeried the data to see what effect those suggestions had.

As it turns out, using a simple "AS400" query with no slash mark does indeed find a few more jobs on some of the sites than does searching for "AS/400." This is particularly true of the Monster site and less so for the Dice site. (All of the data I gathered were for jobs posted in the United States within the prior 30 days.) Here's the original raw data from the June 6 poll I did compared to the July 1 poll:

As you can see, the job counts were down in most cases moving from June to July, which you would expect, but the "AS400" platform had better numbers in July than the "AS/400" platform did in June. So let that be a lesson to you--and me, too. But, the net effect on the relative positioning of the AS/400 (I put the slash back in for the bar chart and word cloud based on this data) is not all that much in the end, as you can see from the data. Here's the bar chart, and remember, for some of the Monster data, they do not tell you precise numbers above 5,000 jobs, which means I have omitted Monster from the averages expressed in the word cloud and from the bar chart as well. Here's the bar chart:

And here's the resulting word cloud based on the averages of the data from the three sites:

Windows, Unix, and Linux still dominate the IT job market, at least as far as job postings are concerned. But the AS/400 in the above image is 40 percent larger, so that is something.

Now, here is the interesting thing. One reader suggested that AS/400 job searchers use aggregator sites, and even suggested one called indeed.com. I took a gander at that site last week, and it claimed to have 5,524 "AS400" jobs in its database, which includes job postings from all over the country. (New York had 114, Dallas had 106, Houston had 103, Atlanta had 89, Chicago had 80, Los Angeles had 73, and Las Vegas had 68, just to give you a flavor of where the jobs are for the AS/400 platform.) If you search for "AS/400" in this job aggregating site, you only get 3,423 postings. "iSeries," by the way, yielded 1,833 jobs on the indeed.com site, "RPG" yielded 1,778, and "iSeries Java" yielded 299 jobs. Of the 5,524 jobs in the indeed.com database, 4,938 of them were for full-time positions, 86 were for part-time gigs, 601 were for contract work, 11 were for internships, and 238 were for temporary positions.

If you have any other suggestions for helping your colleagues find work, send them on over. I know many of you keep your secrets to yourself on this matter--and for good reason. Good jobs are hard to come by. But any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated by your AS/400 brethren.

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