Big Surge in IT, Design and Development Jobs

Online employment platform Elance has released its quarterly Global Online Employment Report, and highlights include record numbers of 193,000 new job posts and contractor earnings of $43 million for the first quarter of 2012.

The number of businesses hiring on Elance for the first time jumped 21 percent, and new user registrations totaled 260,000 for the quarter. IT and marketing hiring managers looking for specialized talent posted more than 120,000 jobs.

Elance's leading indicators suggest the economic outlook may be changing in the upcoming months. Demand for skills such as business card design (+51 percent), market research (+49 percent), branding (+44 percent) and lead generation (+39 percent) were all up significantly in Q1. This trend implies that companies are investing in new business development activities, possibly signaling expectations of increased growth.

Significant Rise in Creative
Creative (design, multimedia and writing) now accounts for 42 percent of total jobs posted on Elance. The rise in creative jobs has been driven by consumer demand for video, audio and visuals and by marketers incorporating this content into marketing and social media strategies. Graphic design jobs are now the second most demanded skill on Elance, and other skills in this category increased substantially in Q1, including video production (+68 percent), video editing (+56 percent), audio editing (+52 percent) and voiceover (+48 percent).

IT Continues to Dominate, Mobile is Up
Information technology remains the top category on the Elance platform in Q1 led by PHP (+33 percent) and HTML (+29 percent). Demand for mobile app developers continues, with 17,000 app jobs posted in the quarter. Job posts for Android developers rose 35 percent, and iPhone and iPad jobs increased 27 percent over last quarter. Demand for Blackberry (+14 percent) and Windows Mobile (+9 percent) apps trailed behind slightly but still experienced growth.