John Conde has shared some of his recent experience when he began job hunting as a PHP developer. If his experience is any indication, it's clearly a good time to be a (qualified) PHP developer.

I created my profile on monster.com on a Monday and made it public that night. The following Tuesday morning my telephone went nuts and my email inbox blew up with recruiters reaching out with positions that I was "perfect for". Over the course of the next week and a half (not including weekends) I spent 10-12 hours a day receiving and returning phone calls, and reading and responding to emails from recruiters.

He received calls from all over the country as well - "apparently experienced PHP developers are in short supply". He points out a few things he found interesting about the search like the fact that unit testing was never listed as a requirement (or even a "plus") in descriptions, only a few descriptions talked about memcache and that PHP wasn't the language over half of the employers were looking for.

He also shares a few hints for those looking for jobs right now, things to add to your resume or look for as far as skills most in demand:

• Have experience with frameworks
• Joomla was very commonly being used so being familiar with it is definitely a plus
• Have sample code to show your coding skills
• There’s more to the world then PHP

On the PHPClasses.org blog, there's an article from Manuel Lemos that gives ten tips trying to help you get a better PHP job (they're all the way at the bottom, just scroll down).

The list of tips include things like:

• Qualify yourself to stand out from the crowd
• Get more exposure to yourself in the PHP community
• Do well on job interviews
• Evolve in your career making your employer profit more

Check out the post for more great tips.

For a lot of developers, just finding good resources to look for a job is half the challenge. Sure, there's the big guys, but what if you need something a little more focused? The Developer Tutorials blog has a few suggestions you can try.

Many position-based boards are full of employers who don’t understand the value of quality code. [...] There are really only two ways to find a decent PHP job, then: find freelance projects from clients that will pay for your expertise, or get a full time job. Here are some good destinations for each.

Their suggestions are broken up into two different categories - freelance or waged. The freelance list includes Elance and PHP-Freelancers while their waged list includes the Zend Job Board and the PHPJobs.com website.

OmniTI, the company that employs such PHP notables as Wez Furlong, Laura Thomson, and George Schlossnagle, is hiring according to this new post from Laura.

We are currently in need of four people:

• A junior PHP dev
• A junior-ish web designer (Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Javascript + ideally some coding)
• An Oracle DBA
• A PostgreSQL DBA

The job ads will be up on our website shortly, but if you are eager to act before then, please email me your resume at jobs@omniti.com.

You can find out more about OmniTI as a company from their site and more about previous jobs and how they hire from these two links.

OmniTI, the company that employs such PHP notables as Wez Furlong, Laura Thomson, and George Schlossnagle, is hiring according to this new post from Laura.

We are currently in need of four people:

• A junior PHP dev
• A junior-ish web designer (Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Javascript + ideally some coding)
• An Oracle DBA
• A PostgreSQL DBA

The job ads will be up on our website shortly, but if you are eager to act before then, please email me your resume at jobs@omniti.com.

You can find out more about OmniTI as a company from their site and more about previous jobs and how they hire from these two links.