Programming, Development and Design Skills to Survive the Recession
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With the current recession in a constant state of flux, today we are going to look at the various skills that have remained robust through these challenging economic times – and those that look to have an strong future. These statistics are based upon oDesk’s own trends pages. When viewing these trends, keep in mind, we are experiencing some overall growth ourselves – so the up-trending graphs will show more growth than average for the skill and the down-trending (or flat) graphs will exhibit more decline than we show.
Computerweekly has some telling statistics that would seem to back us up with respect to PHP and Dotnet (we did notice a drop in Dotnet developer demand in the early year but it has since picked up).
Anyway, on to the numbers!
As you can see, iPhone development maintained strong growth through the whole of last year, with only a slight decline in the most recent months.
Twitter Application Development
Meteoric would be the only way to describe the growth of demand for those with skills to develop for this latest social networking craze, much like the growth of the service itself.
While not a development or design skill, writing has continued a steady strong growth through the last year.
.NET continues its growth and shows continuous steady increasing demand, after pulling out of its end of 2008 slump.
While not much growth, the quantity of demand shows PHP will be around for a long while – and the developers who provide it will remain employed for the foreseeable future.
Showing decent range and stable upward trend, Javascript skills are reliably in-demand.
Photoshop skills also continue to grow nicely and maintain a nice range.
Ability to develop for Wordpress is a very nice expanding market and any PHP freelancer would do well to have it on his resume.
Another specialist platform that a freelance developer would do well to have on his or her resume. Not a great range, but a healthy trend.
Interested in trends on oDesk? Visit www.odesk.com/trends to learn more!
Tamara
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:31 am
I have *got* to learn how to work on Facebook. =)
Frank J
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Great article! I know that Java developers are hard to come by versus PHP developers only because how popular PHP is and how long it has been around.
Our online business is built on a Java framework and it was challenging to find seasoned programmers.
Mustafa
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Well, it’s sad to see J2EE isn’t listed
as I was more emphasizing towards J2EE then .net in past months..
Jonathan - Advanced Life Skills
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:09 pm
A boom in new sectors is often accompanied by a recession in older sectors. I think there is a stronger transitional element involved here that many people realize. Of course, that doesn’t change the reality for someone who has lost their livelihood. It does however change the look and direction of a recovery.
Ruby Pilar
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:42 pm
I’m really glad that the writing jobs continue to rise. However, I really hope to specifically see more demand for green writers (or green freelancers in general) that specialize in creating green content or that work with eco ethics. Can the recession be turned around by green collared workers and freelancers?
Honey Singh
June 5th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Clearly social media jobs are into peak.
Twitter, facebook and wordpress ,designing and blog work comes into high,
In case you are a freelancers or outsource your work to freelancers the you could easily understand this post.
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David Harris
June 7th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Interesting stats there – just included your post in my blog. One thing niggles though…I just wonder if those stats will tell the whole story. The recent experience in one of my businesses (The Oxford Knowledge Company – a regional IT support outsourcing business) has been that we’re getting a big increase in speculative calls from recruitment agencies since we posted jobs at http://tr.im/OKCoJobs They are really feeling the pinch and I wonder if they’re advertising more aggressively in CW and other places. Not sure if it’s a factor, but I’m keeping a watch!