What's the Outlook for Writers

The United States Department of Labor has information on most industries and how the workers fare in their estimation. What they have to say about writers isn’t titled much one way or the other, but it is worth considering.

There are only 324,000 jobs in the United States for writers and editors right now although the articles does say that “thousands more” make a living freelancing. Those numbers are, I suppose, too difficult to track down. After all, wouldn’t one get into discussions about how one claims membership in the writing industry? Do forum posters count? What about bloggers? How about people who have other full-time means of earning an income?

The job growth expected in the next decade is average, but on the upside, the BLS thinks that writers may begin to earn more, especially if they work on the Internet. As more companies turn to the Internet for publishing annual reports, newsletters, and the like, writing will become a more competitive but more lucrative career.

What do I take from this information? These projections are from now until 2014. The biggest growth will be in technical and technological areas as well as medicine, law, economics, and science. That means that writers would do well to begin positioning themselves now as experts in these fields. Many web writers do have not specialization, and it gets harder to get jobs even in the higher tiers of content writing if you have little expertise in any one area.