Year Two of Obama, Still No Jobs... Even in the Web Design field

Seems like the Obama stimulus is really working well (sarcasm). There's still not very many jobs even in some of the growing technical fields out there like web design and graphic design. The following article from http://www.ajc.com/jobs/sharper-skills-slow-to-577400.html shows how there really are very few jobs available in the market today.

After losing her graphic design job, she went back to school to get retrained as a Web designer.

Nine months later, she’s still looking for work.

“It’s very hard out there to find a job. There’s nothing there,” said Tolliver, 34, of Austell. “I keep applying and, hopefully, something will come through. Maybe people will start hiring.”

With unemployment still high — metro Atlanta’s rate shot up last week to 10.3 percent — questions abound as to whether worker retraining really works.

While Washington has pumped $10 billion in grants into retraining programs nationwide the last two years, critics say much more is needed to deal with the unprecedented surge in the long-term unemployed. Georgia’s public technical colleges, along with for-profit ones that have proliferated during the recession, report huge increases in enrollment, yet many struggle to prepare students for so-called “jobs of the future.”

Federal retraining dollars helped 19,050 Georgians go back to school in 2009. About 69 percent of those students got jobs within three months of graduation, according to the state Department of Labor.

As a web designer myself, I can assure you that this woman is not alone. Though Craigslist seems to be filled with jobs for web designers, it's not easy to get a job in this field, even though some are very well paid. Of course, the problem for a beginner often is breaking into a field that has stiff competition and in which clients can be extremely picky about what they want in a designer.