A List Apart has just just published their survey of "people who make websites," with participation from 32,381 web professionals. Over 90% of the respondents hailed from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia, with most of them being in either their 20's or 30's. The survey report is more than 80 pages, so let's look at some of the more interesting stats:
Who are you? Who am I?
It turns out that there is a pretty good 1/3 split between designers, developers/webmasters, and managerial/support fields:
- 80% have at least some college education, though only half actually studied fields relating to their current web-industry job (many self learners there be)
- 60% work more than 40 hours a week, and 72.5% have time for keeping a personal blog
- About 23% are either self-employed or freelance on some level (which is pretty high compared to other industries)
- 65% have had 3 jobs or less, and 20% aspire to start their own business someday
- Females make up 41.6% of the writers, but only 7.2% of developers (interpret as you will)
Surprising to me, over 70% made under $60K, but this might be somewhat reflective of part-time freelancers who responded. The largest majority earned between $40K-$60K. Also,
- You were most likely to make $100K as an information architect, cretive director, or usability expert. Least likely position to make six digits? Web designers...
- Seems that the older or richer you got, the less you saw formal education as being important. Let that be a lesson for the entrepreneurs out there :-)
- And it looks like the big corporations aren't so bad. Over 60% of respondents who worked in organizations of under 10 employees made under $40K. On the flip side, almost 25% of those in 3,000+ organizations pulled down over $80K.
So it seems that web workers are pretty evenly split between being satisfied and being dissatisfied with their jobs, although the older you get, the more likely you are to be satisfied. Some other stats:
- The most satisfied respondents worked in design firms, while freelancers were the least satisfied (anyone care to speculate on this??)
- 60% worked at home at least part of the time (a nice stat to leverage if your employer doesn't let you :-)
- And lastly, where do all there "people who make websites" keep up with the latest web technologies and learn new stuff? 95% say websites, blogs, and zines. Books come in at 76% and in-house training and seminars are way back at 33% and 32%
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