Freelancer.com unveils the fastest growing online jobs in Q3 2018

The Freelancer.com Fast 50 Report charts the quarterly movement of the top 50 fastest growing and declining job type categories within Freelancer.com’s online marketplace, which today includes more than 30 million people across 247 countries, regions and territories around the world.

Freelancing offers skilled professionals an extensive and almost inexhaustible pool of potential clients with which to work. However, the broader business market can be dynamic, with demand for particular skills increasing and decreasing depending on market cycles and longer-term trends. This is why it is important for both freelancers and Freelancer.com to closely monitor the quarterly online jobs trends.

Analysis of nearly 500,000 jobs posted on Freelancer.com, the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace, during the three months ending September 2018 has unveiled the highest-growth categories of jobs online, with work involving web development, digital creative skills, and social media among the top movers during the quarter.

“As host to the world’s largest single freelancing and crowdsourcing community, Freelancer.com has unique insight into the major trends and shifts of the global online jobs market. With jobs in over 1,000 categories in disciplines such as science, engineering, the arts and business, Freelancer.com provides perhaps the most granular and detailed view of the freelancing market around the world,” Freelancer.com CEO and Chairman Matt Barrie said.

Whole lotta web development

Jobs involving website development and internet applications were among the highest growth categories within the Freelancer.com marketplace ecosystem during the quarter, with ASP (or active server pages), the server side script engine often used for web pages that are dynamically created, taking third place in terms of growth during the three-month period.

There were 2,138 ASP jobs posted on Freelancer.com in the third quarter, up from the number of ASP jobs posted the previous quarter, representing a quarter-by-quarter increase of 21.75%. ASP topped the Fast 50 in Q2 2018, and appears to show no sign of diminishing in popularity any time soon.

Meanwhile, React.js, the open-source JavaScript library often employed to develop user interfaces for mobile applications or single page applications (SPAs) on the web, ranked second in terms of growth during the quarter.

React.js jobs experienced 25.73% growth over the three month period ending September, compared to the previous quarter, with 2,121 React.js jobs posted in the more recent period.

At the same time, jobs featuring fellow JavaScript-based web application framework Angular.js, which assists with the creation of single-page web applications, grew by 7.78% during the quarter, to 4,750, with Angular.js ranked as the 22nd fastest growing category.

Adobe Flash, meanwhile, also featured prominently during the quarter. Jobs featuring Adobe Flash, often used to create web applications, along with animations for web pages and online multimedia content, experienced the fourth-highest level of growth of any job category on Freelancer.com during the quarter, representing a 19.54% change from the previous quarter.

It should be noted, however, that the total number of Adobe Flash jobs over the quarter came to 1,890, substantially fewer than the 8,811 jobs involving HTML5, which has grown in popularity since Adobe confirmed in 2017 that it would discontinue Flash in 2020, as reported by Wired.

Over the past quarter, HTML5 jobs experienced a 1.58% increase, compared to the previous quarter, making it the 69th fastest growing job category in the period.

Something about social

Some of the world’s largest social media platform operators, such as Facebook and Twitter have been under immense scrutiny in the wake of accusations the platforms have been used improperly to influence elections.

As noted by CNET, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified during a hearing held by United States lawmakers in September 2018, fielding questions about their respective businesses, and what was being done to reduce the effect of internet trolls and online provocateurs.

Despite this intense scrutiny -- or perhaps because of it -- social media-related jobs saw substantial growth during the September quarter.

Social Networking, a broad job category that could involve a number of skills, such as general help with social networks, designing apps, creating pages or expanding a social network fan page, ranked as the seventh highest growing job category during the quarter. Social Networking jobs experienced a 16.90% surge compared to the previous quarter, to 2,283.

Facebook Marketing came in just under Social Networking as the eighth fastest growing category in this quarter’s Fast 50 list. Facebook Marketing grew at least a couple of percentage points slower than Social Networking, at 15.05%. However, there were 6,733 Facebook Marketing jobs posted during the quarter -- well in excess of the 2,283 Social Networking jobs posted during the period -- reflecting the broader popularity of Facebook Marketing as a job category.

Jobs involving Twitter, meanwhile, were the 13th fastest growing during the quarter, with the category seeing 10.95% growth, quarter-on-quarter. The total number of Twitter-related jobs during the quarter came to 2,747, far fewer than those relating to fellow social media network operator, Facebook.

The Social Media Marketing jobs category ranked as the 14th fastest growing area of work over the three month period, seeing a 10.17% increase quarter-on-quarter. With a quarterly tally of 6,867 jobs during the quarter, Social Media Marketing claimed slightly more jobs during the period than those involving Facebook Marketing, which claimed 6,733 jobs.

Drumming up digital creative skills

Quality content still appears to be king, with creative jobs involving digital tools such as Adobe’s ubiquitous Photoshop and Illustrator editors also among the faster-growing broad skills areas on the Freelancer.com marketplace during the quarter.

Skills involving Illustrator, Adobe’s vector graphics editor, appear to be among the most perennially popular on Freelancer.com, with the job category seeing an 13.74% surge during the quarter compared to the previous quarter. In the three-month period, 27,948 Illustrator jobs were posted.

Jobs involving Photoshop Design, Adobe’s popular raster graphics editor, are also among the more consistently in-demand skills areas on the Freelancer.com marketplace. Photoshop Design jobs saw a 7.29% increase compared to the prior quarter, with 11,607 jobs posted during the three months ending September.

Video Production is another creative skills area utilising digital tools that saw notable growth during the September quarter. Coming in above Photoshop Design in terms of growth rate at number 20, Video Production experienced 8.29% growth, quarter-on-quarter, to 3,905 jobs over the three-month period.

The rise of video production comes roughly a year after members of Forbes' Young Entrepreneur Council suggested in late 2017 that live video and Instagram’s IGTV vertical video application were among the top 10 digital marketing trends entrepreneurs should be watching -- just one of the many areas in which video production demand is on the rise.

Jobs on the slide

At the other end of the spectrum, jobs involving mathematical skills have seen a sharp swing south. Jobs involving Mathematics as a standalone discipline, for example, experienced a 31.17% quarter-by-quarter fall, to 1,948 during the three-month period.

Mathematica and Matlab, two software packages related to mathematics that are used in engineering, scientific and mathematical branches of study, experienced an even sharper decline of 34.16% quarter-on-quarter, to 2,170.

At the same time, Statistical Analysis and Statistics jobs declined by 26.30%, to 1,166 and 25.82%, to 1,652, respectively, compared to the previous quarter.

Also involving mathematical skills, Algorithm-related jobs saw a 27.85% quarter-by-quarter fall, to 2,153 for the three-month period.

Meanwhile, writing jobs in a number of disciplines experienced a slide in popularity during the quarter, with Report Writing experiencing a 31.15% decline, with 5,076 jobs posted during the period.

Moreover, Academic Writing experienced a 28.66% decline, claiming 1,755 jobs and Research Writing jobs fell by 19.53%, although the category itself remained relatively popular, claiming 12,274 jobs during the quarter.

Business Plans, Business Writing and Technical Writing all saw a decrease in jobs posted during the period, experiencing declines of 23.23%, 18.68% and 16.14%, respectively.

Two other areas that saw notable declines during the three months to September 2018 were Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, which saw a fall of 23.57% and 24.12%, respectively.

Trends on the horizon

Blockchain has received a lot of attention over the past few years, with the cryptographically-enabled technology being considered for applications as far reaching as insurance, real estate, banking and even advertising, according to Forbes. The various cryptocurrencies Blockchain underpins, such as bitcoin, have also received a lot of attention, thanks largely to the volatile nature of the value associated with these digital currencies.

While not among the top 50 movers during the quarter, jobs involving Blockchain fell by 1.36% to 1,302 over the three-month period, compared to the prior quarter. This could have something to do with the spectacular tumble the cash value of bitcoin has taken since it peaked in December last year. As reported by Bloomberg, bitcoin fell to a nine-month low in September 2018.

However, it remains to be seen whether Blockchain-related jobs will continue to fall in volume, regardless of how bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies perform over the coming months and years. According to TechRepublic, IT industry association CompTIA has ranked Blockchain among the top 10 types of technology that could offer the greatest potential business operations success.

Machine Learning, another job category that saw a quarter-on-quarter slide over the three months ending September, declining by 6.65% to 1,698, may yet see an uptick in coming quarters, as demand for artificial intelligence and machine learning skills continues to grow. Indeed, in CompTIA’s list of the top tech trends to watch in 2018, artificial intelligence was ranked third, well above Blockchain, which it ranked ninth on the list.

As noted earlier in this report, HTML5 jobs are likely to continue seeing growth as the 2020 date for the discontinuation of Adobe Flash draws closer. In April 2018, CloudPro reported that data provided by web technology survey site W3Techs suggests at least 95% of websites no longer use Flash, and instead are more likely to be using alternative options such as HTML5 and CSS3.

It’s likely that jobs involving these Adobe Flash alternatives will continue to increase, while Adobe Flash jobs will continue to decline. It should be noted, however, that in the Fast 50 report for the three months ending September, CSS3 jobs actually fell by 3.22%, quarter-on-quarter, to 1,113.

The full Fast 50 Q3 2018 Report ranking can be found below:

Freelancer.com’s Fast 50 Report: The 50 Fastest Moving Jobs in Q3 2018

For more information, please contact:

Leon Spencer

Director of Communications, Freelancer.com

lspencer@freelancer.com

About ​Freelancer​ ®

Eleven-time Webby award-winning Freelancer.com is the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by total number of users and jobs posted. More than 30 million registered users have posted over 14 million jobs and contests to date in over 1,000 areas as diverse as website development, logo design, marketing, copywriting, astrophysics, aerospace engineering and manufacturing.

Freelancer owns StartCon, Australia's largest startup conference, expo and entrepreneur community established in 2009, WarriorForum.com, the world’s largest Internet marketing community & marketplace, and Escrow.com, the world’s largest provider of secure online escrow and online transaction management for consumers and businesses on the Internet. Freelancer Limited is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange under the ticker ASX:FLN.