#FridayFindings: April 8th 2011
Posted: April 8th, 2011 | Author: Justin Kozuch | Filed under: Industry, Open Data | Tags: data, data liberation, insights, survey | 1 Comment »Every Friday, we highlight 5 findings from our research and feature them in a weekly blog post. As a lead up to the release of our final report, we’d like to share some interesting insights we’ve found to date.
The Canadian digital media industry is teeming with young professionals. Almost 60% of practitioners who participated in our survey indicated they were between the ages of 22 and 34. A great deal of these practitioners fall within the Generation Y category and have been exposed to technology on a level that is unrivalled compared to previous generations.
The United States is a popular destination for those looking to acquire the necessary skills to succeed in the technology space. However, 91.1% of Canadian digital media practitioners are still engaged academic studies within Canada. Universities such as Ryerson, University of Toronto and OCAD in Toronto, as well as Vancouver Film School on the West coast are well-regarded post-secondary institutions in the digital space.
As employers become more comfortable with providing work from home opportunities their employees (and as the technology to facilitate these capabilities makes this easier), more and more digital media professional are working from home. Almost 40% of practitioners work from home on a regular basis, providing them with opportunities to care for their children, cut down on commuting costs, or work at their own pace.
A small number of Canadian digital media professionals are working more than 60 hours a week. With clients and employers using new methods of communication (Skype, text, Twitter) to communicate with their service providers/employees, and the changing work habits of practitioners, this might result in a health issue as those practitioners grow physically accustomed to working longer hours.
Billing on an hourly basis is still a prevalent model for charging for services rendered. While this is not surprising to see, what is surprising is the percentage of freelancers who have indicated they have implement a value-based billing model for their services. It will be interesting to see how this billing model grows in popularity on a year over year basis.
Over to you
What do you think? What are some of the causes behind the insights detailed above? Post your thoughts via a comment below!
Open Data Sets Now Available For Download
Posted: January 24th, 2011 | Author: Justin Kozuch | Filed under: Open Data | 1 Comment »In keeping with our commitment to making our research data freely available to the digital media community, today we’ve released the first in a series of open data sets. This data is derived from our recently announced survey of the Canadian digital media workforce, and includes the following data points:
- Job title
- Salary
- Location
- Education
These data sets also includes approximately 50 other data points, such as benefits, job satisfaction, and professional development. On a weekly basis, we’ll be releasing new open data sets in CSV and XLS format (with other formats to be added as they become available).
The data catalogue containing these data sets can be found here.
