Online Freelance Work Demand Rises

Apparently, all the firings in the IT departments around the Globe spurred by the recent “soon to be departed” economical crisis have forced all of those professionals to start seeking online work. Since a year ago, the monthly online work index from Elance has seen a major rise (50% more) in job opportunities for freelance online work. More and more, companies are beginning to see the advantages of online work, to the disadvantages of having an IT department.

All those high personnel costs have pushed many managers to showing the door to a lot of their employees and choosing to opt for an easier and cheaper solution: outsourcing. With its advantages (reduced costs) came a lot of disadvantages (communication problems, lack of professionalism from some of the freelancers, no timeline or deadline control), but, all in all, the online freelance work demand has managed to rise since October 2008 with about 50%.

In its monthly report, Elance, the leading website for finding reliable online work, has shown two interesting trends in job opportunities for high-quality professionals. The first of them sees the recent rise in contracts for copywriters around the Globe. Skills like Content Writing (#2, +7), Article Writing (#2, +1), Copywriting (#12, +7), Creative Writing (#13, +4), Academic Writing (#18, +34), Technical Writing (#30, +32), Grammar (#38, +25), Financial Writing (#83, +23), Newsletters (#85, +28) and Press Release (#94, +10) have shot up the top, showing the recent trend around the web for written-content websites.

If you haven't noticed, a lot of blogs, tutorial websites and written-content portals have been launched recently, due to the low costs in managing a news&rumors websites, in contrast with a normal production business venture. More and more people are capitalizing on the success of business ideas and websites like TMZ, Mashable, Smashing Magazine, Tuts+ or TechMeme and launching their own news portal from their home.

As in the previous months, the second trend sees the rise of technical skills inside the top's rankings. After retaking the number-one spot two months ago, PHP held to the lead, while other technical skills saw a rise in work offerings in the month of September. Joomla!, WordPress, CSS, HTML, MySQL, SEO, AJAX and Flash were all in the top 20, while osCommerce skills saw a huge leap of 80 positions to the number-47 spot. This should be of no surprise, since the holidays are already creeping on us, and Internet users are soon to turn their interest towards gift-shopping.

The overall top ten is as follows:
PHP;
Content Writing;
Article Writing;
HTML;
Graphic Design;
Joomla!;
CSS;
Illustrator;
WordPress;
Web Content.

A detailed ranking of the skills can be found here.