by Mark Ace

A year ago it looked like anyone with a business plan, a unique domain name and a couple of ASP programmers could secure boatloads of venture capital ó followed closely by IPO wealth. The bloom is off that particular rose. Just one year later, investors have remembered that profits do matter.

With the rise and fall of the dot-com hype cycle, there has been a corresponding amount of churn in the job market. In the last year, we've seen people roll in and out of start-up jobs with amazing speed. Promises of wealth and market share have been used to lure people into newly created positions. Some of those positions have fallen far short of their supposed potential. Many people who accepted generous stock options to make a job move are hoping the current carnage in tech stocks is a temporary phenomenon.

Despite the fact that bellwether tech stocks are currently out of favor, our local business and technology economies seem active and healthy. There seems to be plenty of investment in people and infrastructure surrounding technology development. Wherever there is a serious software development effort, there is a need for writers.

Fortunately for the Portland area, there is a substantial community of healthy dot-coms. Anchored by a number of large, established technology companies, start-ups and newly launched companies in town seem to have generally strong prospects, even if their stock price doesn't reflect it at the moment. The rapid growth in the dot-com sector is creating many job changes. As people move to follow new opportunities, their former positions become available.

For the past year or so, the job market has been favoring writers with web-based software development experience. This trend continues today. If anything, there is increasing demand for writers with greater technical expertise. Server-side programming, Java help, and ASP experience are frequently listed in technical writing job descriptions. People involved in start-ups that have not fared well have been quite successful at applying what they've learned at those companies. Finding work has not been a huge problem for most.

Hiring trends have moved away from contracting positions in favor of full-time staff positions. It may be that local technology companies are trying to secure and retain a more stable workforce. Generally speaking, long-term contract positions are more common at larger companies, where headcount limitations can prevent full-time staff hiring. Small and mid-size companies seem to favor full-time staff hiring as a way to limit downtime associated with people transitioning in and out of their organizations.

As always, there is a consistent demand for technical communicators who bring technical literacy, excellent writing and communication skills, and strong interpersonal skills to the workplace. So crack the latest technical journals, keep your portfolio current with web-oriented material and challenge yourself to do the best work you can.

Mark Ace is Immediate Past President of the WVC and owner of Ace Communications, Inc., a company specializing in technical writing staffing and services. All the views expressed in this article are his opinion only. Reference to economic indicators are circumstantial at best, and are not the result of any kind of educated analysis, leading the author to recommend reading the above with appropriate-sized salt grains in mind. He can be reached at http://www.ace1.com.