Where the jobs are: The Seattle report

Spend a few minutes on Glassdoor.com and it can quickly turn into an obsession. That’s the website where job-seekers investigate job postings, companies’ cultures, and the quirks of their interviewing style.

    Did you know, for example, that when trying to land a spot at Whole Foods you might be asked whether you’d rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? As long as they’re free-range, isn’t that the important thing?

    On Glassdoor you can also learn that people holding the title of “data scientist” make, on average, $127k per year at Uber — just a skosh more than the $14.65 per hour their drivers take in.

    Looking for an inspiring boss? 3,082 employees of Sears say “don’t come here.” A mere 15 percent approve of the job their CEO, Edward Lampert, is doing. The guy should consider running for President.

    Glassdoor can also tell you how many jobs are up for grabs by title, by city, and by company. Here in Seattle, where all the ships are rising with Amazon’s tide, there are 4,813 Amazon job postings in search of qualified humans.

    Dissecting the data a bit more, you’ll see that Seattle-area companies are looking for 1,317 user experience designers, 1,214 visual designers, and 3,977 people with the word “content” somewhere on their future business cards.

    These high-demand jobs stand in laughable contrast to professions that were pretty hot stuff not all that long ago: advertising art director (30), advertising copywriter (21), and railroad engineer (18).

    You don’t have to be going after one of the 6,424 rocket scientist (OK, aerospace engineer) positions to figure out that your best chances for scoring a new career is to pursue one of the fields where the job postings break a thousand.

    Here in Seattle, the School of Visual Concepts is greasing those skids by offering 40-week certificate programs in user experience (UX), user interface/visual design for digital (UI), and content writing. Classes are taught at night so you don’t have to quit your current day job — at least not yet — and each student is assigned a top pro to serve as their mentor.

    By the conclusion of the programs, students will have created a pro-level portfolio and made some serious professional connections that can be very helpful at job-hunting time.

    For more information about SVC’s programs, check out svcseattle.com/certificate. For more information on how to answer this interview question reportedly posed by Trader Joe’s, consult an animal mortuary: What would you do if you found a penguin in the freezer?