With the economy still going south, people are retraining themselves for jobs of the future. Does the world of SEO and SEM contain the key to new job category potential?

The current downturn in the economy has everyone looking in more nontraditional places to find work. Almost everything has gone digital. Gone are the days of picking up a newspaper and browsing through the classifieds. There are numerous ways to look for a job these days. Job web sites like monster.com, Yahoo's hot jobs, careerbuilder and hundreds of others give you a way to customize your search. Even non-traditional job-oriented sites like craigslist have supplanted print for people searching to jump back in the world of employment. The fact that you can better customize your search is the good news. But, if you're looking for a job in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is the job market increasing and is the right job out there waiting for you?

SEO and SEM are the hot jobs right now in the world of marketing. More and more companies are turning to SEO campaigns and expert forecasters believe this trend will continue. Just checking the local and worldwide sites, you'd think there are thousands of jobs out there. If you're looking for a job, checking the national and local web job sites are one of the ways to look for work. While there are jobs out there, there may or may not be as many jobs as people think.

Although there appear to be more openings, sometimes it’s merely one opening with many postings for that position. Be very careful when looking for a position that it isn't being posted by a host of different recruiters for a company. For example, if a marketer leaves one job for another job, one job has suddenly opened up. The number of openings has remained the same: one job. But, since activity surrounding this job begins with different people positing on different websites or on different job boards, the appearance is that of industry growth in a certain sector. As a marketer, you could create in your mind the illusion that the new posting combined with the previous posting filled by that one candidate means there are more jobs out there.

As mentioned before, there are companies who are looking more and more to incorporate Internet Marketing, but they still don't completely understand its full potential. Numerous blogs and online marketing magazines still tell stories of major well-known corporations who either ignore using SEM or do not know how. On the flip side, when companies do attempt to hire online marketers, executives’ misunderstanding or lofty ROI expectations of SEO with their media mix can mean the hires are let go too early. From this lack of patience, a higher turnover rate is created, but it doesn't necessarily mean a bigger job market is created.

There best way to tell if there is true job growth in the online job market is to look at employment figures from employment agencies. The bad news with this method is that due the timeliness of the statistics release, you can never truly get an accurate picture of the job market. You're looking in most cases at eight to ten month old data and markets can go from hot to not in the span of that time. Another mistake is that just because job growth in slow in New York doesn't mean it’s slow in San Francisco.

To properly tell if there is job growth in the world of SEO you should start at the grass roots level. If you are working in the field of SEO, look at the company that you're working for. Are they hiring new employees? Are they hiring in your department? If the answers are yes, that is very positive news. Also, keep dialog on-going with previous co-workers in the SEO/SEM industry. They can provide an accurate look and what's going on outside. Keep an accurate account of new jobs you see, not duplicate postings combined with your personal social findings and that should be a good indicator.