Hiring for Animation

Mr. Kaplan and I circled around these data points today. They represent animation hiring nationwide, but they track local trends we've observed here at the Animation Guild.

During the past 90 days, recruiters posted more than 4,000 online job ads for animation skills, increasing 25% year-over-year, according to WANTED Analytics™. ...

The five metropolitan areas with the highest volume of job ads for animation skills were Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Washington (DC), and Seattle. Although Recruiters in Los Angeles posted the most ads of any city, hiring demand over the last 90 days actually declined about 2% ... In comparison, Recruiters in Washington, DC saw the most year-over-year growth over the past 90 days, with 77% more job ads than were seen online during 2011. ...

The thing of it is, animation takes in a wide sweep of territory in 2012. It ain't hole-punched paper and painted cels anymore. Now it's broadcast and internet graphics, online games, commercials, visual effects, hand-drawn and cgi television animation. And if you don't know the requisite software packages, you better go learn them.

There's more people working in animation (and related disciplines) than ever before, but the idea that the gigs are all high-paying is a happy fiction. There are jobs going for ten bucks an hour, and jobs paying a hundred. Demand for talent, geographical location, and the size, budgets and schedules of projects determine what the wages will be.

I don't see demand for animated product slackening off anytime soon. I also don't see the pools of talent growing smaller. Lots of colleges have animation curriculums, and they're all turning out eager recruits who want to get into the cartoon business.