The best way to measure the impact and relevance of a technology is probably to look at job openings. According to the Wall Street Journal the demand for Flash developers in Silicon Valley has suddenly surged:

With the advent of online social gaming start-ups such as Zynga Game Network Inc. and others—many of which make online games that involve Flash technology—demand for Flash engineers has suddenly surged.

Mochi Media (one of the largest online gaming networks) says it is hard to find good Flash engineers.

To get around the lack of Flash engineers, Mr. Hsu says Mochi Media tries to hire engineers who know programming languages such as Java and then train them to use Flash. “It’s a six-month time investment, but most can pick up Flash very quickly,” he says.

Be sure to read the rest of the article on the WSJ site. Oh… and ehr… Flash on!

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for quite some time but for some reason never got around to it.

I remember someone asked me about Flex jobs in Europe when I showed this graph at the Flex pre-release tour last February. This graphs shows the increase in demand for Flex coders but is based on data from the US. I remember responding to the question saying that everywhere I go, people ask if I don’t know anyone that knows Flex or ActionScript. So I did a quick check with a few companies in Belgium and the demand is definitely there.
Boulevart is currently looking for Flash developers and Flex/AIR developers. LBi is looking for Flash/AS3 developers. iDa/MediaFoundry is looking for RIA developers. These Days is looking for Flashers/Flexers.

And I’m pretty sure there are more jobs out there if you look for them. And that seems to be the big problem right now. You’ll have to do a little bit of extra effort to actually find these jobs. You usually won’t find them in the newspapers…

Peter Elst is trying to make that a lot easier. He just launched RIAjobs.org, a job board targeted at Rich Internet Application developers from various backgrounds be it Flash, Flex, AJAX or Silverlight. As it only launched a few days ago, there aren’t that many jobs yet but I’m sure that will change soon. Usergroup meetings and conferences are also a great way of meeting companies who are hiring and obviously keeping an eye on your favorite company’s website is also a good way of finding out about job opportunities.