Online Workforce Expanding, Especially in Mobile and Social

A recent blog post that caught the attention of readers included a summary of the annual report from online employment platform Elance. Another Web employment marketplace, oDesk, has released its own year-end report with similarly positive views of both the year in review and the year ahead.

The report from oDesk says that employers spent $115 million on online work in 2010 and that job opportunities doubled from 2009 to approximately 602,000. Mobile was the best bet for job-seekers, and positions involving Android expertise shot up 680 percent from 2009 while iPhone-related jobs increased by 152 percent. Social media was not surprisingly the next hottest jobs category, and the hottest regions for online contractors were the Philippines, India and the United States.

For 2011, oDesk predicts that online work will continue to double year-over-year while local employment will not rebound to pre-recession levels. The report also predicted that more than 500,000 employers will hire cloud-based workforces for the first time, including 25 percent of the companies that make up the Fortune 500.

The number of people looking to make online work their primary source of income in 2011 will double, according to oDesk, and the hiring of online workers by companies outside of the U.S. will explode in the next year, the report says. U.S. spending on online work, meanwhile, will grow more slowly in 2011, representing 65 percent of the worldwide total.