Android app development ranked as the fastest-growing skill in the third quarter on Freelancer.com, the talent platform reported. That skill was followed by AJAX, which is used to develop websites, and API, which allows software programs to communicate with each other.
Freelancer.com noted that technology-related skills dominated the rankings in its third-quarter “Fast 50 Index,” which measures the change in the number of jobs each quarter.
“The macroeconomic environment, tech winter, and nosebleed inflation have led to an almost daily string of announcements of layoffs. The most similar event was the global financial crisis where we saw three trends: businesses looking to cut costs and going online to hire freelancers, people looking for work online and a lot of startup businesses formed to bridge people through hard times,” Freelancer.com Chief Executive Matt Barrie said. “However, this was mostly contained to the United States. We think that heading into 2023 we could see this all over again, but on a more global scale.”
In addition, the third-quarter report found that projects calling for search engine marketing fell by almost a third. At the same time, interest spiked in digital marketing, traditional marketing, and YouTube jobs.
Also noted: Jobs in crypto and nonfungible tokens showed steep declines.
Freelancer.com’s report is based on 296,000 jobs posted to the Freelancer platform between July 1 and Sept. 30, 2022.
The fastest-growing jobs on Freelancer.com in Q3 2022 compared to Q2 2022:
| Skill | Job Count Q2 2022 | Job Count Q3 2022 | % Increase |
| Android App Development | 1,082 | 1,954 | 80.59% |
| AJAX | 1,059 | 1,763 | 66.48% |
| API | 1,587 | 2,532 | 59.55% |
| Blog Writing | 1,058 | 1,642 | 55.20% |
| YouTube | 1,138 | 1,505 | 32.25% |
| Customer Support | 1,531 | 1,998 | 30.50% |
| Business Cards | 1,861 | 2,427 | 30.41% |
| Amazon Web Services | 3,004 | 3,834 | 27.63% |
| Flyer Design | 1,658 | 2,114 | 27.50% |
| Customer Service | 1,370 | 1,746 | 27.45% |
| Covers & Packaging | 1,253 | 1,596 | 27.37% |
| Copy Typing | 4,827 | 6,147 | 27.35% |
| Microsoft Office | 1,041 | 1,308 | 25.65% |
| 2,240 | 2,809 | 25.40% | |
| Leads | 1,387 | 1,738 | 25.31% |
| Book Writing | 1,537 | 1,920 | 24.92% |
| Digital Marketing | 1,738 | 2,141 | 23.19% |
| AngularJS | 2,817 | 3,459 | 22.79% |
| Codeigniter | 1,070 | 1,313 | 22.71% |
| Bootstrap | 1,263 | 1,526 | 20.82% |
| Sales | 2,544 | 3,020 | 18.71% |
| Software Development | 2,069 | 2,442 | 18.03% |
| Creative Writing | 2,122 | 2,464 | 16.12% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 1,055 | 1,223 | 15.92% |
| Word | 3,001 | 3,433 | 14.40% |
The fastest-declining jobs on Freelancer.com in Q3 2022 compared to Q2 2022:
| Skill | Job Count Q2 2022 | Job Count Q3 2022 | % Decrease |
| Solidity | 1,422 | 613 | -56.89% |
| Smart Contracts | 1,442 | 726 | -49.65% |
| Matlab and Mathematica | 2,494 | 1,256 | -49.64% |
| Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) | 1,424 | 718 | -49.58% |
| R Programming Language | 1,097 | 626 | -42.94% |
| Ethereum | 1,173 | 705 | -39.90% |
| Statistics | 2,377 | 1,439 | -39.46% |
| Statistical Analysis | 1,697 | 1,032 | -39.19% |
| Report Writing | 5,495 | 3,392 | -38.27% |
| Mathematics | 2,485 | 1,552 | -37.55% |
| Machine Learning (ML) | 3,472 | 2,225 | -35.92% |
| Database Development | 1,309 | 867 | -33.77% |
| Web Scraping | 5,787 | 3,905 | -32.52% |
| Electrical Engineering | 3,381 | 2,322 | -31.32% |
| Microcontroller | 1,833 | 1,268 | -30.82% |
| Research Writing | 10,950 | 7,580 | -30.78% |
| C Programming | 7,202 | 4,987 | -30.76% |
| Mechanical Engineering | 2,228 | 1,546 | -30.61% |
| Legal | 1,351 | 938 | -30.57% |
| Search Engine Marketing | 2,300 | 1,600 | -30.43% |
| Engineering | 4,264 | 2,968 | -30.39% |
| Unity 3D | 2,014 | 1,424 | -29.29% |
| Research | 5,548 | 3,926 | -29.24% |
| Electronics | 2,897 | 2,066 | -28.68% |
| Python | 14,967 | 10,745 | -28.21% |