Elance Work Index - September

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:29:00 GMT

Elance released their September work index today, a report highlighting hiring trends in the freelance marketplace. Trends from this month's index include:

- The presence of Search engine optimization (+18 in the 17th position), content writing (+5 to the 9th position) and article writing (+2 to the fourth position) indicates companies realize they don't necessarily need to pay for traffic.
- The index indicates that companies are reinventing themselves as branding made a significant jump (+25 to the 54 position) and Public Relations was newly added to the list (in the 87th position).
- PHP regained its number one position as the most sought after skill online. Other programming/development skills in the top ten include Adobe Flash, CSS, and Excel.

Some interesting points came to the fore during my discussion with Brad Porteus, Chief Marketing Officer of Elance this week, related to the trends Elance sees and the viability of their platform. A few statistics helped clear up any confusion or doubt (at least for me) about the efficacy of the Elance platform:

- 60% of projects are filled (considered to be when a "job" is actually assigned to a freelancer)
- Over 90% are ultimately paid (Elance is an escrow service giving it a lot of credibility with buyers)
- Only 1% of jobs enter "dispute" (those that run into trouble are those which attempt to go around the system)

Porteus also addressed some specific areas that consistently top the Elance list including open source (specifically those dealing with the LAMP stack - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), Design (namely presentation layer work such as graphic design) and as apparent in this month's work index (and mentioned previously), content writing and SEO.

August Hiring Trends From Elance

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:27:00 GMT

Freelance contractor network Elance released its August edition of the "Elance Work Index" which ranks the top 100 skills in today's online labor market.

The data is derived from more than 100,000 jobs posted on Elance in the past few months and is a good market indicator for online work tracking 9what companies - or individuals - are hiring for).

What this month’s index shows is a continued need for IT and marketing expertise with graphic design, open source technologies, and online marketing skills (once again) topping the charts.

Notable trends from this month’s Index include:

- Graphic Design (#1) has regained the top spot in the Index trumping PHP (#2) which had held the pole position the past four consecutive months.

- Technology hiring trends continue to reaffirm the open-source movement with PHP (#2), MySQL (#3), and Joomla! (#8) firmly entrenched in the Top 10.

- Demand for cost-effective customer acquisition is demonstrated by Internet Marketing (#7) moving up five spots and bolstered by the Top 25 placement of Search Engine Optimization (#21), Lead Generation (#22), and Sales (#23).

- Demand for Twitter (#71) expertise dropped 25 slots, with Facebook (#63) and Social Networking (#45) also falling this month.

- Google Website Optimizer (#31) made a huge 28 spot leap, and Google Analytics (#93) and Google AdSense (#68) both debuting in the Index for their first time.

'Net Features : hiring trends

Elance Work Index - September

August Hiring Trends From Elance