Q1 Jobs Report Documents the Rise of E-Commerce

Michael Garrity — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:30:00 GMT

Last week, Freelancer.com revealed the figures for what it found to be the 50 fastest growing online jobs for the first quarter of 2013. What the global outsourcing marketplace found was that the e-commerce industry continues to grow at an impressive rate, Android is starting to catch up with Apple, marketers are returning to the loving embrace of email over Twitter and Facebook and much more.

By analyzing 283,490 jobs during the quarter, Freelancer.com found that e-commerce is steadily dominating the “consumer retail landscape,” as other retail outlets with a brick-and-mortar presence are having trouble adjusting to a consumer base that is “no longer geographically captive.”

The e-commerce industry netted an impressive 19 percent increase in online jobs in Q1 2013, and as a result, e-commerce technologies have also been bringing in more employees. For example, shopping cart solution providers have increased jobs by 18 percent, while Magento, specifically, saw a 14 percent lift.

This has also spurred interest in Core Web 2.0 technologies, with an increased demand in jobs based around HTML5 (up 20 percent), CSS (15 percent), PHP (nine percent), jQuery (seven percent), MySQL (three percent) and WordPress (20 percent), largely because they allow e-commerce companies of all shapes and sizes to create mature, scalable online stores that “have all the feature of a massive retailer like Amazon” for a low price.

Elsewhere, in the mobile technology sector, Android jobs have gone up by over 20 percent, while iPad and iPhone-centric jobs only rose by 11 and five percent, respectively. This is primarily because Apple has had trouble penetrating the market in developing nations, which account for approximately 85 percent of the world’s population.

When it comes to social, Twitter has seen a nice boom, with jobs growing by 18 percent; this is significantly better than Facebook, for which jobs actually fell by four percent. However, both social networks have been taking a backseat when it comes to online marketers, who have been returning to email marketing as the primary way to drive customers to their websites. Email marketing jobs actually went up by 21 percent during the first quarter of this year.

On top of that, SEO jobs have been recovering from the industry's three percent slip in the fourth quarter of 2012, with SEO jobs rising by eight percent, and content based jobs like article submission or technical writing seeing increases of 54 and 26 percent, respectively.

Plus, 3D design jobs have been increasing steadily thanks to the introduction of 3D printers into the mainstream. 3D modeling jobs are up 21 percent, while 3D rendering jobs are up 13 percent and the 3D animation industry saw six percent growth.

Finally, back-office business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs saw a huge 113 percent increase in Q1, as small and enterprise-level companies, alike, have been outsourcing simple (and affordable) work to get ahead of the competition.

Mobile Jobs Surge While Search Still Somewhat Slow

Linc Wonham — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:15:00 GMT

More than 170,000 jobs were posted on Freelancer.com in the first quarter of 2012, up from 130,000 in the previous quarter, according to the Freelancer Fast 50 – the company’s quarterly report on the 50 fastest growing online job categories.

“Projects are up over 30 percent compared to the previous quarter,” says CEO Matt Barrie. “The huge growth in outsourcing is made up of a wide range of different types of projects being completed in countries all across the globe.”

The following online freelance employment trends for Q1 2012 were identified in the report:

• Mobile app development grows: Android jobs rose 26 percent to 2,863 while iPhone jobs rose 27 percent to 4,318. The iPad category was up 19 percent to 1,828 jobs as “post-PC device” sales outstripped that of personal computers. The demand for mobile developers has been insatiable and will continue to grow as more businesses seek to offer their products and services on these platforms.

• Open standards will own the Web: HTML5 jobs rose 48 percent to 2,160 while jQuery jobs rose 39 percent to 2,324. This has been to the detriment of older and proprietary technologies such as Flash (down 1 percent to 2,697 jobs). The continued high growth of post-PC devices and iOS’ lack of support for Flash has forced many companies to switch to supported open standards.

• Overall outsourcing surges: Outsourcing of back-office and non-core functionality has seen a dramatic rise in the last quarter with business process outsourcing (BPO) showing the highest growth of any job category. BPO, up 303 percent to 5,150 jobs, performed the strongest, with data processing (up 187 percent to 18,349 jobs) and data entry (up 111 percent to 30,837 jobs) also solid performers. Businesses are also turning to online freelancers as a cost-effective means of providing around-the-clock customer support, as customer support jobs rose 89 percent to 1,173 jobs.

• Big increase in virtual assistant (VA) jobs: The VA category was up 144 percent to 3,205 jobs as many businesses that traditionally do office administration in-house are outsourcing these tasks as a result of the comparatively low cost of off-shore labor.

• Search remains stagnant: SEO jobs were “only” up 8 percent to 10,152 as the category remained comparatively stagnant. Despite a stronger recovery for SEO in late 2011, Google’s constant fight against low-quality link building has had a major impact on the SEO industry.

The report’s data was extracted from 172,936 jobs posted on Freelancer.com in Q1 2012.

'Net Features : freelancer fast 50

Q1 Jobs Report Documents the Rise of E-Commerce

Mobile Jobs Surge While Search Still Somewhat Slow