Digital economy jobs leap as clamour for engineers grows
DEMAND for IT jobs leapt by more than a fifth in the last few months, as firms increasingly invested in app and website development, and internet retail and advertising picked up.
Figures from online job website Freelancer.co.uk showed that adverts for the world’s 50 most popular digital jobs grew from 230,614 in the third quarter of the year from 189,917 in the previous quarter.
Some of the fastest growing job postings were for HTML 5 developers – for building websites using the latest programming tools, for eBay sellers as the site unveiled a radical redesign and ahead of Christmas, and for Facebook advertisers as the social network recovered from the gloom surrounding its initial public offering in May.
The figures also came as a boost to Google’s Android smartphone software and a blow to Apple.
Job postings associated with Android, such as app developers, rose 16 per cent in the quarter after the success of Android’s hottest smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy SIII, while demand for iPhone jobs rose at a much slower eight per cent ahead of the launch of the iPhone 5 and the iOS6 software.
The survey revealed that the biggest increase in jobs was associated with the “paperless office” – transcribing paper documents into files and moving them online. Jobs for copy typing and the translation of paper documents to electronic ones rose 145 per cent in the quarter, driven by the increased use of cloud computing – storing documents online.
Recent tweaks to how Google arranges its websites and adverts in search results also drove jobs.
Internet marketing and search engine optimisation positions were both up 12 per cent, while link building – increasing the number of external websites that link to a client’s – rose by eight per cent.