GigZig: Career Forecasting Semantic Web Style

By Scott Abel, TheContentWrangler.com

GigZig is a pay-scale forecasting service that allows users to interact with salary survey data in a fairly unique way. Provide GigZig with your job title and it will cull through millions of salary survey records to predict what job titles (and salary levels) you might have five years from now. It also provides you with the job titles and average salaries from five years ago by people who do the same job you do today. It’s a very interesting—and revealing—way to look at salaries, job titles, and potential career paths.

“While many people stay in the same job for many years or follow a predictable path,” GigZig says, “other job stories are delightfully unexpected: A barista can become a software developer; a financial advisor can become a nurse. GigZig shows the real relationships between jobs and what those jobs typically pay based on answers submitted by the millions of people who have taken the PayScale salary survey.”

Of course, only you can be the judge of what is “real”. Do people who answer salary surveys provide accurate, honest information? Who knows? The relationship between your job and salary and your GigZig history might not jibe, perhaps because your career path was not “typical”. We ran a search on “Technical Publications Manager” to test out the service (see some results below).

We’ve ran a few searches for your convenience:

• Technical Writer
• Web Content Editor
• Marketing Manager
• Web Developer
• Information Architect
• Information Technology Consultant
• Software Sales Representative
• Quality Assurance Tester: Software

Give GigZig a whirl. If you find something interesting, the site provides a way to share your results with other via email and to tag the results for others to see.

Source: First noticed on I’d Rather Be Writing blog. Thanks to Tom Johnson.