14 DAY TRIAL // Working from home, on your own terms, with no boss and no break schedule has become in recent years a real alternative to holding a regular job. With increased rates and earning possibilities, coupled with new marketplaces to find work on, the number of self-employed people has grown in recent years. The U.S. Department of Labor annual reports and statistics from Elance, the market leader for the web-design and development jobs niche, show an increase in online freelancing.
In the United States only, the U.S. Department of Labor is reporting that more than 42 million Americans were self-employed in 2009 alone. Since 2009 will forever be remembered for the harsh economic conditions, which led to many people being fired, it is not known if those people opted or were forced into this kind of freelance jobs.
On the other hand, web-related job marketplaces have seen an increase in activity and in the number of jobs posted using their services. The recent statistics tool launched by Elance called “Online Talent Report,” reveals some good news for those considering working from home in IT, web, networking and programming-related sectors.
With the user pool racking up around $70 million in 2009 and $245 million since the service launched, Elance has seen a 45% increase in activity since 2008. With around 101,000 employers and another 101,000 service providers, almost 308,000 jobs where posted on the marketplace last year alone.
Employers were mainly interested in work categories like IT (Web, Mobile, Open Source, Cloud Computing), Creative Design (Design, Multimedia, Writing, Translation), Marketing (SEO, SEM, Lead Gen, Branding) and Operations (Admin Support, Data Entry, Research).
For the IT category, as common-sense dictates, PHP was the most demanded skill by employers, closely followed by HTML, MySQL, CSS and WordPress. In the Creative Design category, employers were especially interested in people with talent for Article Writing, Graphic Design, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. For the marketing category, experts in SEO, Internet Marketing, Lead Generation and Sales were in high demand.
The report also comes to strengthen the general idea that some countries have the proper educational system in place for building professionals in some areas of web-design, programming and IT. The current hot spots for searching an IT expert are the United States, India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Romania, Russia, Bangladesh, Argentina and the Philippines.
The general conclusion after thoroughly reading the entire study is that mobile development is currently the hottest topic in programming, with rapidly increasing job opportunities for iPhone, iPad and Android jobs. Content and article writing also saw more job opportunities in 2009, thanks to the “business of blog” trend's expansion.
The entire Elance report can be read here.