Can't even get the name right.

In looking through the want ads, it's a little difficult to see why planning jobs are so hard to find.

Nationwide, a search of "planner" hits 20,093 jobs.  A search of "zoning" nets 2,300 jobs.  "Entitlements" gets 5,916 jobs.  Hell, even "urbanist" gets 16 jobs.

Let's start with that last one.  All but two of the urbanist jobs are for a company called Vocus.  They do social network PR and are looking for bus drivers, sales managers and accountants.  Why do they come up in a search for "urbanist"?  Because their headquarters is "new-urbanist" and they've included that fact in their business blurb.

Looking at "entitlements," the first four entries are nothing planning related.  Only the fifth one, an Entitlements Manager for a big home developer, involves planning and zoning issues.

(I've become very interested recently in how the word "entitlements" has been adopted into the planning lexicon.  That's a story for another day.)

"Zoning" starts with a planning job, peripherally.  It's dealing with due diligence for a retail chain.  A couple of notches down are zoning inspectors for Smyrna, Georgia and Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Between those are multiple positions with computer systems and data storage.  For computers, zoning is about balancing loads and storage in a network.  And there are a lot more IT jobs out there.

That first one, the "planner" search with 20,000 jobs?  Most of them are for Buyer/Planners and Planner/Schedulers.  These are product and inventory moving jobs.  They've nothing to do with city planning.

(And, for what it's worth, putting "city planning" in quotes like a good boolean only yields minor improvement.  The number of jobs available are 63 with the first four being non-planning related.  The first seven are unrelated, if you exclude city clerks and administrators.)

But then you type in "lawyer" or "accountant" and there is no question about the jobs that are being listed.   You get well down both of those pages before hitting your first entry about "working for lawyer" or "assisting the accounting department".

The upshot here is that we are not very good at defining who we are as planners or what we do in our daily work.  For those looking for jobs, that is a doubly harsh.  The digital parsers that are looking for matches between your resume and the job description are indiscriminate.  They don't care about controversy in our field.  They just reject you.

If the computers do not respect your work, how can you respect your job.