Who's Hiring?? The Bright Spots.

Check out these job postings compiled by Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research for Social Computing. Owyang maintains a must-read blog on Web Strategies for anyone responsible for marketing campaigns online, building or belonging to online communities, or managing online communications or corporate images.

This list ought to give you a clue where 2008's job growth has been: social media, web strategies and other online community management.

Here's an example:

You might not have heard about this, but apparently the real estate market has been in a little trouble this past year (*mild sarcasm*), but the National Association of Realtors is hiring--if you've got the skills to be their Manager of Social Media!

So, what kind of jobs are these--besides growing ones? Well here's the future that awaits you if you applied for the Realtors' Assoc position:

• Monitor real estate industry and related social media
• Facilitate NAR’s participation in external blogs and social media
• Maintain, evolve, and enforce NAR’s social media policies and guidelines
• Train NAR staff and elected leaders about how to write for blogs and other forms of social media
• Monitor existing NAR blogs and create new ones as needed to foster conversations about relevant topics or issues
• Measure the effectiveness of NAR’s social media efforts

So if you're in the job market, think you may soon be in the job market, or want to be indispensible at your current job, invest in new skills like these. And keep in mind, that there's always opportunity, even in the places you'd last think to look! (Like real estate.)

And thank you Jeremiah Owyang for advancing these job opportunities and being a source of good news!