Most of us are not lucky enough to know what career we want to go into until quite late in the game. With everyone talking about a bad economy coming our way, that choice never seemed more important. Want to narrow down your choices based on the job market conditions? There are quite a few ways to do this.

Last time I posted about jobs, I mentioned the value of search optimizing your resume, and gave you an easy way to discover the most recruiter-searched resume keyword terms. I also discussed the reason many people end up hating their job, and how to avoid it.

Today, I wanted to show you a tool to find out the trend for a particular keyword in job descriptions posted by employers. Seeing a trend can be an incredibly powerful visual aid in ascertaining the demand for certain skills. To find out this useful information, I use a nifty site called Indeed.com’s job trend tool. I show you some uses, below.

Research a Job Sector

Let’s use the term “Photoshop”, (a popular graphic design software) for example. As you can see in the graph below, the recent demand for photoshop skills appears to have dropped off dramatically.

My guess is the design market has reached saturation, and many workers in non-design positions have sufficient Adobe Photoshop skills to pitch in with moderate levels of design work when necessary, eliminating the need for full time designers at many companies.

The fascination with posting our digital photos everywhere likely increased general interest in Photoshop skills, and the industry workers seem to have gotten hit by that.

Determine Which Skills to Learn

You can also use this tool to consider which particular skills are worth your time to learn, based on their trend. For example, I plotted different nursing qualifications to find out which are most in demand, and the growth of each. You can see below that some qualifications appear to be much better bets for a student to spend time on.

There’s Safety In Portability

No matter what industry you are in, there always seems to be the same foundation. This foundation is the group of positions which exists regardless of the economy’s situation, and weathers any storm. Some examples of foundation positions are marketing positions, executive leadership, public relations, management, secretarial work, accounting, and legal.

These positions must exist for the company to function, and can largely be transferred from industry to industry and company to company. Indeed, many of the top CEOs of our time have held the post in completely unrelated industries. James McNerny, for instance, was CEO of 3M before he assumed the top position at Boeing. I hope planes have nothing to do with tape!

During bad economies you can protect your career, even if you get laid off, by being in a foundation position. There will always be another company that needs a foundation employee, and often will see your outside industry experience as valuable.

If you have already chosen your career, you can still take steps to improve your odds in a bad economy. Here are some great tips to recession-proof your job search.