Last week, Freelancer.com revealed the figures for what it found to be the 50 fastest growing online jobs for the first quarter of 2013. What the global outsourcing marketplace found was that the ecommerce industry continues to grow at an impressive rate, Android is starting to catch up with Apple, marketers are returning to the loving embrace of email over Twitter and Facebook and much more.
By analyzing 283,490 jobs during the quarter, Freelancer.com found that ecommerce is steadily dominating the "consumer retail landscape," as other retail outlets with a brick-and-mortar presence are having trouble adjusting to a consumer base that is "no longer geographically captive."
The ecommerce industry netted an impressive 19 percent increase in online jobs in Q1 2013, and as a result, ecommerce technologies have also been bringing in more employees. For example, shopping cart solution providers have increased jobs by 18 percent, while Magento, specifically, saw a 14 percent lift.
This has also spurred interest in Core Web 2.0 technologies, with an increased demand in jobs based around HTML5 (up 20 percent), CSS (15 percent), PHP (nine percent), jQuery (seven percent), MySQL (three percent) and WordPress (20 percent), largely because they allow ecommerce companies of all shapes and sizes to create mature, scalable online stores that "have all the feature of a massive retailer like Amazon" for a low price.
Elsewhere, in the mobile technology sector, Android jobs have gone up by over 20 percent, while iPad and iPhone-centric jobs only rose by 11 and five percent, respectively. This is primarily because Apple has had trouble penetrating the market in developing nations, which account for approximately 85 percent of the world's population.
When it comes to social, Twitter has seen a nice boom, with jobs growing by 18 percent; this is significantly better than Facebook, for which jobs actually fell by four percent. However, both social networks have been taking a backseat when it comes to online marketers, who have been returning to email marketing as the primary way to drive customers to their websites. Email marketing jobs actually went up by 21 percent during the first quarter of this year.
On top of that, SEO jobs have been recovering from the industry's three percent slip in the fourth quarter of 2012, with SEO jobs rising by eight percent, and content based jobs like article submission or technical writing seeing increases of 54 and 26 percent, respectively.
Plus, 3D design jobs have been increasing steadily thanks to the introduction of 3D printers into the mainstream. 3D modeling jobs are up 21 percent, while 3D rendering jobs are up 13 percent and the 3D animation industry saw six percent growth.
Finally, back-office business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs saw a huge 113 percent increase in Q1, as small and enterprise-level companies, alike, have been outsourcing simple (and affordable) work to get ahead of the competition.