Online freelance marketplace Elance has published the top 100 most asked-for skills amongst projects posted on its service. My immediate reaction was pleasure at seeing PHP, MySQL, CSS, WordPress, Flash and XHTML in the top 20 (with PHP and MySQL 2nd and 3rd) since these are my areas of expertise (along with Flex which doesn’t appear in the top 100).
So, should you use the list to decide where to develop your skills? Yes and No, in my view. Yes, because you can see that there is a market there. No, because in many cases there will be huge numbers of people already working in those markets.
For example, Flash appears at number 12 and yet Actionscript only at number 99. However, it’s also a fact that the number of developers with solid Actionscript skills (especially Actionscript 3) is a tiny fraction of the number of people who use Flash. In other words, whilst the number of projects for Actionscript is less than those for Flash, the number of developers able to respond to those projects is also much less.
Looking at the site now, I can see 440 current jobs for “Flash” and only 56 for “Actionscript”. The Flash jobs look to have an average of around 7 bids at the moment, whereas the Actionscript jobs have an average of around 3 The average value of the Actionscript jobs also looks higher to me.
It seems to me that a developer stands a much better chance of success when one of three competitors than when one of seven (even when there are far fewer projects to bid on: how do you effectively bid on 440 projects?) and the reward is a bigger average project value as well. This is where I’d concentrate my efforts: being a big fish in a smaller pond is much preferable to the opposite.
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