Photo credit:Yes Virginia/CBS

Last week we took a look at a new way to do some research in the jobs space thanks to TrueKnowledge culling jobs data from the deep web.

Alas, the sad truth seems to be that while you can leverage semantic web technologies to help you research the jobs space, that doesn’t mean it’s going to get any easier any time soon to find a job – at least in most sectors.

The July jobs report that came in last week revealed that we are still trapped in a 9.5 percent unemployment rate – and piled on top of that are some other disheartening statistics:

▏ The number of unemployed persons, at 14.6 million, also was unchanged in July;
▏ The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and
over) was little changed at 6.6 million;
▏ The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes re-
ferred to as involuntary part-time workers) was essentially unchanged over
the month at 8.5 million;
▏ About 2.6 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in July, an increase of 340,000 from a year earlier – and among those there were 1.2 million discouraged workers in July, up by 389,000 from a year earlier. (Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.)

But there amidst the darkness some bright lights may be twinkling for those that have a grasp of semantic web technologies. As we mentioned in last week’s story, TrueKnowledge has a number of openings on its plate, and it looks like Thomson Reuters has something up its sleeve involving its OpenCalais semantic platform. Tom Tague posted in an admittedly cyptic blog last week that the team there is looking to hire “several great people” — “News Ninjas,” as he calls them.

It doesn’t appear that they’ll need specifically to be experts with OpenCalais as the company looks “at solutions that range from archive monetization to more flexible content syndication to better newsroom workflow capabilities to tools to enable investigative journalism – basically anything that helps improve our customer’s business.” But he’s clear that some technical background, as well as experience in the news industry, are going to be required among applicants.

Other Potential Job Hunting Sources

If you’re in the semantic web space, here are some other job alert sites you may want to explore for opportunities for the Web 3.0-savvy set (in addition to the usual job search engines such as Monster and Indeed):

▏ Bloomberg BusinessWeek Business Exchange has a Semantic Web national jobs board in beta, suggested by semantic web expert Paul Miller here ;

▏ The New York Semantic Web Meetup has this NYC Semantic Web Jobs board here (why not check your own local Semantic Web meetup group for options in your area?). The NYC version doesn’t appear to have been very recently refreshed, but if you’re in the tri-state area and on the hunt, it’s worth a bookmark;

▏ ResearchGATE, found here, reaches out to many areas, and frankly we didn’t find that many jobs that turned up in a search on “semantics” there yet. But with a focus on research jobs and disciplines including data structures and human computer interaction across the world, it couldn’t hurt to spend some time checking out the possibilities.

Good luck to everyone — in the semantic web space or any other one — trying to find a position in these times. It’s clearly a huge challenge, and we wish you the best luck in meeting it.

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