Apple ups its e-market share of freelance jobs

Jobs related to Apple products continued to increase their share of the online freelance labour market in September, in contrast to those related to Microsoft.

Announcing its Fast 50 for the third quarter, Freelancer.com said Cocoa jobs and Objective C roles were up by 55% and by 23% respectively, while Microsoft-led posts continued to be down.

In fact, fewer jobs between July and September would have affected Microsoft freelancers “across the board”, with the dip hitting .NET (which created 2,737 jobs), Windows Mobile, Exchange, Access, Server and Expression. Cocoa was the third fastest-growing skill (with 743 jobs) and Objective C is the eleventh (with 1,035 jobs).

But the Fast 50 authors added that the real “falling out of favour” was more likely reserved for Java (down 13%), possibly thanks to the advance of PHP (up 3%), which generated 25, 639 jobs.

Hailed by the website as the “behemoth” of its 50 fastest growing skills, PHP also tops the latest list of ‘hot’ candidates at an IT jobs agency, alongside .Net.

In an annual review of its billings yesterday, CV Screen said: “There is continuing high demand for candidates with strong development skills, with both PHP and .Net skills still areas where there is a shortage in supply of experienced developers”.

For developers who are web-based and only work remotely, the demand is most marked for HTML 5 (with 1,125 jobs), which is due to overtake Flash (with 2,794 jobs), in terms of the number of projects and posts it creates, within the next six months.

Freelancer.com reflected: “Adobe is planning for a post-Flash future, with the company recently [having] launched Edge, which enables professionals to design animated Web content using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, rather than Flash.”

Elsewhere, the Fast 50 shows that the rate of growth for Android-related roles has more than halved, but Google’s product was predicted to overtake the iPhone in the job creations stakes by late 2012.