Research on What Industries are Where

Fred Sampson (wfreds@cruzio.com) says:  I'd start with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unfortunately, it appears that the most recent detailed info is for 1999, but you can search around for SOC 27-3042 Technical Writing within various industries and see what the employment estimates are. I saw numbers like 48,000 TWs, with 13,000 in computer-related industries. You can also look for state or regional statistics.

What Industries are Where?

Has anyone got good demographics on where the industries that employ Technical Writers are? A flurry of recent messages in the TECHWR-L mailing list under the Subject: Begging for help in West Virginia (see the TECHWR-L archives)talk about where a newly-minted BA in Writing can find employment brings up the question: in what industry? Most of the readers of TECHWR-L are in the Computers & Internet part of the profession, but there's Biotech, and Appliances, and Policies & Procedures, ...

I asked (Executive Director) Bill Stolgitis at the STC Annual Conference in Nashville in May 2002 whether the STC has any industrial demographic information--whether we had any idea what the profile of industries in a given chapter's area might be. I know that Silicon Valley chapter has a lot of Computer TW jobs and a number of Biotech jobs, and that a lot of Biotech is in New England. He observed that Connecticut has a lot of insurance businesses, so Policies & Procedures would probably be big there, but admitted that the STC has no such information. We agreed that this would be Good Information to have, but how would it best be gathered?

If we poll the STC membership, asking what industry each respondent is in, that might be a quick beginning. This could be part of the information requested with renewals. But it would be optional, and what about the writers who are not STC members, not to mention the members who work on contract and write for a spectrum of industries?

Should we start from the writer end, or do we want county-level (or urban-conglomeration-level) data about what industries operate there and provide what sorts of jobs? Would the individual state departments of employment development have that info? Might it be on the Web somewhere?

Ideas, anyone?