Jobs Data Points to Deluge of Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs, Rise of Android
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Job listing data from 2011 released this week by the freelance web site Freelancer.com. The web site combed through data from 783,373 jobs posted on Freelancer.com in 2010 and 2011. What they found revealed some pretty interesting trends in terms of where tech job – and tech companies – are headed.
Here is a summary of the survey results.
Web 2.0 entrepreneurs
The web has been the main battleground of technology entrepreneurs for many years, but with the emergence of an online workforce as a key resource, even the layperson can now launch a website or iPhone application, Freelancer.com said. "From our data, it is clear that 2012 will see the emergence of a whole new generation of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs."
The company reported the following key trends in web tech:
· HTML was up 193 percent (to 72,571 new jobs)
· HTML5 was up 118 percent (to 4,121 new jobs)
· Website Design up 94 percent (to a massive 83,931 new jobs)
· Shopping Carts up 68 percent (to 8,437 jobs)
· PHP rose 69 percent (to 104,597 new jobs) in 2011
With the boundaries and capabilities of the web constantly being pushed by industry heavyweights such as Google and Facebook, there is a growing need by web developers to integrate more Web 2.0 elements to keep pace and stay relevant, Freelancer.com said.
Job posting increases for job related to Web 2.0 integration were:
· Javascript jobs increased by 66 percent (to 22,835 jobs)
· jQuery grew 175 percent (to 5,493 jobs)
· AJAX rose 41 percent (to 15,168 jobs)
· CSS was up 65 percent (to 15,199 jobs)
An increased push by small and medium-sized businesses to compete with retail giants like Amazon have resulted in a big increase in e-commerce jobs, Freelancer.com said.
· eCommerce jobs increased 34 percent (to 11,612)
· Shopping Carts jobs increased 67 percent (to 8,437 jobs
· Magento rose 57 percent (to 5,789 jobs)
Content providers
Content writers also took a big hit in 2011.
With the announcement of changes to its search algorithm at the start of 2011, deceptively nicknamed "Panda," Google declared war on content farms, and began an arms race that promises to continue into 2012, Freelancer.com said. While estimating that only 1 percent of all searches would change at each update, the pain caused was felt across the Internet from major sites through to the smallest niche blog.
The impact on writing jobs was immediate as the industry reeled in the fallout from the changes in the first quarter of 2011 in which copywriting, ghostwriting and article submission jobs were down significantly. However the content industry rallied and ended the year with more jobs than the year before.
· SEO jobs were up 63 percent (to 36,174 jobs)
· Copywriting up 7 percent (to 22,047 jobs)
· Ghostwriting up 32 percent (to 12,585 jobs)
· Article Submission up 61 percent (to 4,530 jobs)
We anticipate that the market will remain buoyant as Google and the SEO/content writing industries continue to play cat and mouse through 2012, Freelancer.com said.
Smartphones
Mobile Phone jobs were the fastest growing online job category on Freelancer.com with a 216 percent increase (to 12,262 jobs) in 2011. Android jobs ended the year 2011 by growing 163 percent (to 7,431 jobs), double the iPhone's 81 percent growth rate (to 12,527 jobs).
From current growth rates, we estimate the number of new applications developed on Android will overtake the iPhone in Q4 2012, Freelancer.com said.
While the iPhone 4S launch in October boosted iPhone jobs, we believe that a bigger boost will come if the iPhone 5 ships, delivering developers with new primitives to work with. In 2011, we saw a 217 percent increase in Cocoa (to 2,293 jobs), and a 151 percent increase in Objective-C (to 3707 jobs), technologies with which Apple’s desktop and mobile applications are built. Apple’s blocking of Flash on iOS platforms sounded the death knell for Adobe’s Flash in 2011, which shrank 11 percent (to 12,247 jobs). We believe that online jobs related to Flash will be in terminal decline by mid-2012.
Nokia and Microsoft mobile platforms are dead, Freelancer.com declared.
Microsoft was down 29 percent (to 888 jobs), Symbian down 34 percent (to 349 jobs) and Nokia down 44 percent (to 488 jobs). BlackBerry jobs were too low to appear on our Q4 report, and only grew 14 percent (1,955 jobs) overall growth for 2011, the company said. "We predict that application development for these platforms is now terminal," Freelancer.com said.
The company also reports big growth in iPad jobs.
iPad jobs increased 125 percent (to 5,589 jobs) in 2011, and are growing at 22 percent compound per quarter. This rate already surpasses the growth rate of iPhone jobs (18 percent per quarter), the company said. "We believe that the rate of new applications for the iPad will accelerate significantly, as applications catch up to the matching the tremendous growth rate at which iPads are currently shipping, developers cotton on to the new platform paradigm and the iPad 3 ships," Freelancer.com said in a statement.
Blackberry's Playbook tablet, which launched in Q2 2011 is stillborn with insignificant interest according to our data.
Microsoft
Microsoft jobs took a major dip in 2011.
· Windows Desktop jobs down 37 percent (to 1,256 jobs)
· IIS down 37 percent (to 331 jobs)
· Microsoft down 39 percent (to 888 jobs)
· Word down 12 percent (to 808 jobs)
· Windows Mobile down 8 percent (to 515 jobs)
· .NET down 5 percent (to 12,108 jobs)
· Microsoft Access up 1 percent (to 1,166 jobs)
· Microsoft Exchange up 1 percent (to 236 jobs)
The only bright spots in the report are ASP up 12 percent (to 4,544 jobs), Visual Basic up 12 percent (to 4,103 jobs), C# Programming up 27 percent (to 7,369 jobs), Sharepoint up 38 percent (to a tiny 413 jobs) and Windows Server up 84 percent (to 872 jobs).