33,000 web professionals speak: The A List Apart survey

A List Apart (one of my favourite web resources) have just posted the findings from their 2007 Web Design Survey.

33,000 web professionals answered the survey, which covered areas such as the kinds of organisations people worked for, job satisfaction, length of time in the profession, area of work, education, skills, skill gaps and perceived biases.

The resulting 81 page report (note: PDF) makes for interesting reading. The first 20-odd pages are basic findings; the rest are detailed break-downs by age, gender, salary, job title, ethnicity, geographic location ...

Some of the things that interested me:

• Gender split of respondents: Male 83%, Female 16% [1% no response].
  
• Overall, women and men who are working full-time were earning similar amounts.
• Designers were most likely to perceive their education as relevant to their work; writers/editors the least.
  
• 73% of respondents had their own blog or website. It didn't really matter if you were a man or a woman, earned under $20K or over $100K, were a writer or an information architect, under 21 or over 60: you most probably had a blog.
• Mark-up (HTML, XHTML) was the most-claimed skill; writing the least.
  
• Interface designers were the most likely to feel they lacked a needed back-end skill: developers the least.
  
• 20% of respondents who felt they needed CSS coding skills didn't have them.

Normally, reading survey results isn't high on my list. But in browsing through this one, I suddenly got a sense of how I professionally fit into a global workforce, and what that workforce looks like, thinks of itself, has evolved. I recommend it, especially if you're in a management position and looking to grow this part of your institution/business.