50 fastest growing online jobs, report indicates creatives in top 10

The leading indicator of trends in online jobs related to industries, technologies, products and companies based from the review of the 440,718 good jobs posted on Freelancer.com in Q3 2016 (up from 405,859 on Q2 2016) is that jobs related to the creative industries are on the rise whilst core software languages still dominate overall job numbers.

Photography jobs grew by 22% in Q3 2016 compared to Q2 2016 and, by analysing these projects, it sees that more employers finally understand the importance of high quality pictures on their landing pages.

This growth is further backed by video editing making an appearance at number three on the list with a 19% increase, as video content becomes one of the initial draws and call to actions for most customer-focused websites. Heavy video marketing through social media also increases this demand.

Touted as the reason behind Airbnb’s huge rise to success over its rivals, the world now turns to high quality visuals as network speed continues to increase whilst more of the world comes online.

Whilst continuing to be far greater in numbers than the creative work mentioned above, it is interesting to see data related projects, specifically algorithms (-42%), statistics (-40%), mathematics (-37%) and computer security (-37%) take large falls when compared to the previous quarter. As the report compares the rise and fall of jobs from the previous quarter, we expect to see these creative projects start to catch up to the total numbers of these hard-skill projects in the next report.

German language on the rise

Jobs with German language skills rose heavily in Q3 2016, also with a 22% increase from the previous quarter. The specific reasons for this can be plenty, however from understanding the current political implications experienced from the Brexit vote in Europe, much has been made of Germany and Berlin in particular trying to lure companies away from London and the UK.

Berlin Senator for Economics, Technology and Research, Cornelia Yzer, is warning British companies that remaining in Britain after the country leaves the European Union will damage their businesses, and she says that Berlin will provide resources that will help them relocate. Sentiments also picked up by Wall Street Journal, Reuters and CNBC, however, with an added warning not to be too carried away. This explains the sudden interest in the German language.

Adding to this demand, Freelancer.com now has German language customer support in its European offices, as well as seeing user numbers in Germany scale by 30% in the past 12 months. The region is very much now the focus of many European businesses, cementing the recent confidence in Berlin and Germany as a European hub of innovation.

Demand for virtual assistants continue to scale

Virtual assistants demand rises 18% this quarter, because more entrepreneurs are making the leap to establish their own startups or their established businesses continue to grow. By giving administrative tasks and smaller day to day jobs to a virtual assistant, then the business owner is freed up to continue on the most important aspects of their business, growth!

Growth and more growth with SEO

SEO is a huge part of business growth today regardless of how large the business entity may be and it sees a rise of 9% to 17,479 jobs. SEO and growth related tasks are of huge importance to the success of Freelancer.com and this is covered extensively in the StartCon conference being run by Freelancer.com from 26 November 2016, in Sydney, Australia.

Mobile gaming engine outshines native app developers

Unity 3D, the popular gaming engine initially released in 2005, storms up the ranks with a 9% rise in projects posted. Now working with all major mobile operating systems, as well as games consoles and PCs, demand increases as the company continues to release new tools for advanced graphic and performance capabilities, including VR.

Branding, blogs and AWS related work were also among the top growing jobs (to 16%; 14%; and 12% growth - or 1,294; 1,872 and 1,679 jobs respectively), which likely also supported these small businesses’ need to create cohesive and consistent strategies for their companies online.

For more information, go to www.freelancer.com.