Online job trends: your next job should be in mobile, not SEO

Thinking about a career change? Well, you should probably think more about mobile, and less about Facebook and SEO.

According to the latest online jobs trends report by Freelancer.com, the number of jobs for iOS and Android developers is continuing to grow, but jobs relating to the world’s biggest social network declined 14% from April to June. In the wake of more updates to Google Panda, SEO jobs took a seven percent hit as Google made life more difficult for those practising blackhat techniques.

According to the analysis of around 190 000 job posts and four-million Freelancer.com users, iPhone app developer jobs grew 30% from earlier in the year, and eclipsed Android developer jobs by 10%. General mobile phone jobs rose 36%, while iPad jobs were up 26% from last quarter. Open source continues to dominate the web, with HTML5 and jQuery jobs seeing major growth (20% and 17% respectively). Meanwhile, .NET and ASP jobs continued their decline into obscurity.

“Two clear trends are evident: firstly, user activity is moving to mobile devices and the trend won’t be reversing any time soon as the other 5 billion people on this planet join the internet, primarily through mobile,” said Freelancer.com Chief Executive, Matt Barrie. “Secondly, the internet is becoming more interactive, and the technologies that are winning and will continue to win are open standards like HTML5 and jQuery — to the detriment of the incumbents proprietary technology providers like Adobe and Microsoft,” Barrie said.

Times have been tough for Facebook recently — from their less than stellar IPO to the perceived loss of faith in the power of Facebook advertising. While Facebook-related jobs were down 14%, Twitter jobs only dropped by a marginal one percent.

It seems that businesses are looking to weather the economic downturn with business process outsourcing: back-office positions, from virtual assistants to data entry clerks, were up strongly across the board. Virtual assistants were up 18% to 3 770 jobs, demand for MS Word processing skyrocketed 119% to 1,594 jobs, data processing (up 16% to 21 274 jobs) and MS Excel (up 13% to 22 947 jobs) also rose quite significantly this quarter.

Internet marketing is also undergoing a bit of a shake-up: online marketing jobs were down 5.6%, sending SEO and link building projects (down 8.3%) tumbling. Article rewriting and article submission also headed for the hills as the fight against low quality content rages (down 9.3% 4.0% respectively). Oddly enough, telemarketing was up strongly on lower volumes, perhaps as marketers look to other areas (up 11%).