While the overall U.S. labor market continues to struggle with unemployment close to 10 percent, demand for contract workers online is growing at online job mart Elance.
Online professionals contracting jobs via Elance earned over $23 million in the second quarter of 2010, a figure the company said is a 45-percent increase over the same quarter a year ago. Privately-held Elance said 88,729 new jobs were posted on its network in the second quarter.
“Frustrated by the traditional on-site staffing model, businesses are embracing virtual and hybrid work structures which allow them to tap into highly skilled online teams on a flexible basis,” Ellen Pack, vice president of marketing at Elance, said in a statement. “Talented workers with hot skills such as Google App Engine development, HTML5, SEO and Social Media Marketing are experiencing unprecedented demand for their expertise and can find steady work and growing incomes.” [login]
IT, the biggest Elance category, in terms of earnings, is up 44 percent in the second quarter versus last year. Search engine optimization (SEO), internet marketing and lead generation head the list of skills that have seen the biggest increase in demand. The top 10 IT skills in demand on the Elance list are: PHP, HTML, MySQL, WordPress, CSS, Flash, JavaScript, iPhone, Ajax and Joomla.
Google App Engine, the search giant’s cloud-based application development platform, just cracked the Elance top 50 list of skills in demand in the first of this year. But App Engine jumped to 37 on the list in the second quarter, moving past Amazon Web Services (40th) for the cloud platform with the highest demand for skills.
iPad, mobile skills in demand
Another big mover was iPad developer positions; the category jumped 24 positions to number 16 on the IT skills chart.
Mobile skills also placed highly on the list with iPhone (8), Android (25) and BlackBerry in the number 36 spot.
A geographic breakout in the Elance report shows that East Coast cities are the most active in the U.S. New York City came in first followed by Brooklyn, N.Y. in the No. 2 spot. Houston, Chicago and San Francisco round out the top five most active cities in terms of hiring.
Elance said New York is now the “geekiest” city on its list with the highest earnings. New York bumped San Francisco to the second spot, followed by Los Angeles, Portland, and Queen Creek, AZ. Elance vice president of marketing Ellen Pack said one company doing a lot of open source development hiring in Queen City helped boost the Phoenix suburb’s rank.
TAGS: online hiring, Elance, Google App Engine, HTML5
