Can’t Anyone Do This Job? – The State of the FAFA Talent Pool

I’ve worked for advertising agencies, freelanced through recruiters, freelanced through private agents, freelanced on my own and owned my own design shop so I’ve had experience in every chair at the job applicant negotiating table. One thing I can definitively state is that it has never been harder for employers to find talented individuals with Flash, Actionscript, Flex and AIR skills (let’s call them FAFA pros so I can say I coined another buzzword).

Ask any design or development shop whether they are looking for FAFA pros and the answer is almost uniformly “yes.” Ask any FAFA pro whether they have recruiters and human resources people constantly contacting them and, again, the answer is almost uniformly “yes.” Now ask the design and development shops whether they’re getting the FAFA pros they need and the answer is a resounding “no.” So the question is this? Why did the FAFA business become such a seller’s market? In short, the reason is the most fundamental principle of economics: supply and demand.

You Can’t Learn This in School

There are now classes is FAFA at various design schools and universities. However, the instruction most students receive is inadequate to prepare them for a FAFA career, even at the finest academic institutions. There are two simple reasons for this.

FAFA is Too Complex

Firstly, very few schools have a program that focuses specifically on user interface design and development and FAFA is so deep that it requires a great deal of independent learning to absorb it all. FAFA is as much a design platform as a programming platform. A FAFA-friendly education would hybridize a graphic design major with a user interface concentration and a computer science major with a software engineering concentration. You can imagine how rare that is. Only specialty trade schools like the Rich Media Institute in Venice, California, free of the responsibilities of university-style accreditation, are capable of offering a competent FAFA education at this time.

FAFA Changes Too Fast

The second reason that schools do not graduate good FAFA employees is because FAFA is evolving too quickly for schools to keep up with it. Other related technologies and skills like traditional graphic design and older programming languages change perhaps once every few years. A computer science major that studied Java five years ago can still apply that education today. FAFA, however, changes dramatically every year. The final “A” in FAFA (AIR – Adobe Integrated Runtime, formerly codenamed Apollo) just graduated from alpha to beta status recently. The technology is less than a year old and still not commercially available yet already employers are asking for it on job boards. By the time a student has graduated the technical components of his or her education are already obsolete. Without exception, my colleagues fresh from school have told me that I taught them more about FAFA in six months than they learned all their years at school.

Actionscript 3.0 – it gets worse before it gets better

Additionally, another major blow to the FAFA talent pool is the earthquake that is Actionscript 3.0. The vast majority of the old Flash community do not consider themselves programmers. They used just enough Actionscript to get the job done without knowing or wanting to know what the code meant. Flash was previously more of an animation tool than an application development platform. Actionscript 3.0, which the latest version of Flash, Flex and AIR are all based on, changed all that. Actionscript is now a strict, unforgiving, robust programming language and intolerant of the hacks, cheats and workarounds which were par for the course in Actionscript 1.0 and 2.0. This change will has two effects, one after the other. First, designers who don’t have the desire to learn to a complex programming language just to keep designing will opt for, as r. blank, creator of the Rich Media institute, put it, “less computationally-intensive work like Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver,” further sapping the talent pool. After that initial shockwave we will begin to see a clearer separation of FAFA designers and FAFA developers with exceptional skills in one but not the other. Until employers realize the difference they will continue to search out FAFA pros who do both, people who will become increasingly hard to find.

Demand

“Rich Internet Application” is a powerful buzzword these days. It seems like everyone-and-their-mother.com needs a slick Flash site, a Web 2.0 application, a social networking doohickey, or some other high-tech product to satisfy their web-technology buzzword lust. This means one of three things, depending on their product needs: they either need an AJAX guru (AJAX is built on much older technology than Flash so there are plenty of pros available), they need a Silverlight guru (so brand new and cutting-edge that most clients aren’t even aware of it yet so there’s not much demand there), or they need a FAFA pro.

There’s no denying the fact that Adobe has been enormously successful in making the Flash Player almost ubiquitous. Adobe’s previous Flash Player, version 8, is installed in more than 96% of the developed world’s computers. Even the the latest version, Flash Player 9, increased from 36% to nearly 85% penetration in six months. The average web consumer makes no distinction between Flash and “modern website.” They consider them one in the same. Kudos to Adobe on their success. Now we just need more people to create them.

Supply

The FAFA pro pool, much like any other skilled trade, is divided into five distinct groups, Class 1 (gurus), Class 2 (seniors), Class 3 (mid-level pros), Class 4 (juniors) and Class 5 (students). The problem is that the distribution of talent across these statistically skewed much much lower than other similar skilled trades. There are far fewer gurus and seniors than in other similar industries like Java development or print design.

Class 1 – like hitting the lottery

The upper echelon is the Class 1 FAFA pro. This is a tight circle of world-class design gurus and technologists that set the standards in the industry. These people are the developers creating the tools everyone else uses, keynote speakers at conventions, authors of the books aspiring designers and developers buy to learn the craft and widely considered to be the cream of the crop in the Flash world. These individuals number less than 50 in the world, are disproportionately located in California, and would easily command an annual salary on par with the legal or medical profession, were a private company interested in making an offer. Most of these individuals have senior-level skills in related technologies outside of Flash, like Java, WPF and C-based languages. The majority of these people either operate their own companies or work on developing the Flash, Flex and AIR platforms themselves at Adobe and Adobe’s affiliates so they can be considered categorically unavailable.

Once in a blue moon one of them decides to relocate and every time that happens the FAFA world shakes with the news. Really, I’m not exaggerating. Whenever a rumor circulates that a guru is considering doing something new recruiters, agents and HR executives have their phones glued to their ears and their Blackberries on overdrive until some deep-pocketed company issues a press release about how happy they are to have this individual joining their team.

Class 2 – unavailable

The next tier down is filled with senior-level FAFA pros. Class 2 FAFA pros often have a decade or so of experience in several industries. Their design or development skills in other areas outside of FAFA like motion graphics, high end programming languages and key-art-class print design are often so high that they could just waltz into a job outside of FAFA if they so desired. These people have been around the block over and over, know the game inside and out, and struggle to avoid showing how jaded they are.

Class 2 FAFA pros are up to their eyeballs in work because their numbers are so few and their skills so high. The ones who work for companies are the backbone of the FAFA team (sometimes they ARE the FAFA team) and always have more work than time. The ones who freelance are constantly turning work away because of human limitations like the need for sleep. These individuals are the ones the recruiters seek out most because the commissions for placing FAFA pros of this caliber are substantial and it’s pretty unrealistic for a recruiter to dream of representing a guru. However, these people rarely have a spare minute so they don’t entertain cold calls or return emails from interested parties looking to hire them. It’s can be as difficult to get an audience with a FAFA pro as with a senator.

Class 3 – surprisingly expensive

The next tier down from that represents the Class 3 FAFA pro, someone with a handful of years of experience, perhaps familiar with a couple of related technologies like Javascript and XML (if a developer) or skilled with standard design tools like Photoshop and illustrator (if a designer). To extend the analogy, if it’s as hard to get the attention of a senior-level FAFA pro as a senator, a mid-level FAFA pro is about as reachable as a member of the House of Representatives – it’s not impossible because there are more of them but it’s still not easy.

Most of the posts on various job boards at tech-specific sites like actionscript.org, newstoday and dice are looking for Class 3 FAFA pros, However, many the employers have fairly unrealistic expectations of what they will be paying for someone in this class, since the market price for a person with a handful of years of FAFA experience is statically higher than many other areas of software development and shockingly higher than most other areas of design.

Class 4 – common but unreliable

Class 4 FAFA pros are common, many of which are only a couple years out of school and still at their first or second job in the industry. The FAFA learning curve is so steep that these individuals are still very wet behind the ears and their skill sets vary wildly from one individual to another. However, because of their ready availability, they are often presented with offers that are typically reserved for a Class 3 professional in another industry. They usually jump at the chance because of the seductive increase in pay, however, If the accept they often get in over their heads. At that point they have two choices: sink or swim.

Class 5 – too green

Class 5 FAFA pros aren’t pros at all. They’re students and interns. Unfortunately, because FAFA is inadequately taught in school, FAFA interns and students are without exception require a great deal of training to get them up to speed. If searching for these types of individuals I would recommend making hiring decisions based almost exclusively on work ethic and “personality fit” rather than actual skills, since they will learn more in six months on the job than in four years of design school.

Predictions for the Future

I think the two factors that make the FAFA industry a seller’s market today will eventually reverse themselves and the playing field will level out somewhat. Tomorrow’s higher education students will see what the pay is like for today’s FAFA experts and tailor their educations to prepare themselves for it. Also, as FAFA ages it’s rate of change will slow considerably and schools will be able to create educational programs that are still relevant five years later. Furthermore, the ocean of Class 4 FAFA pros will eventually reach Class 3 and Class 2 and employers will have more people to choose from. These changes are inevitable but they’re still several years off so until then the feeding frenzy will continue. Bon appétit.

Explore posts in the same categories: Design, Development, Industry

Tags: IdentityMine

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.