Projects requiring niche tech skills lose sheen among Indian freelancers: Report

The fastest-growing job by percentage in India is creative writing.

As slowdown continues to impact economies across the world, niche tech skills are the fastest falling in the overall category amongst Indian employers, shows data put together for Moneycontrol by Freelancer.com.

This aligns with the global data as the India data shows Metatrader, Web Development, iOS Development, Software Development, Full Stack Development and API are part of the top 10 fastest falling skills of the last quarter.

However, non-tech skills registered an overall increase of 32.8 percent in Q2 when compared to the previous quarter against tech skills which only grew by 2.2 percent.

The fastest-growing job by percentage in India is Creative Writing, followed by Adobe Lightroom and Writing (Microsoft Word).

Freelancer.com, the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by number of users and jobs posted, has over 1.73 crore registered Indian freelancers and clients. In 2022, Freelancer.com added 12.29 lakh new users from India, with students making up the largest percentage at 30.5 percent.

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Local Jobs, which are where employers hire freelancers in their local area to do service or physical-based jobs, follow the same trend as the global data and are also growing in India. Local photography and videography jobs are on the rise both globally and in India.

As per the data, a majority of the rising jobs are associated with organic marketing and promotion of businesses on a budget, as opposed to paid options such as advertising. This is why writing jobs, local jobs and web searches are increasing.

As for tech jobs, the freelancing portal is seeing two main trends: an increase in iOS development in the form of iPad, iPhone and Objective C skills, and a rise in network administration.

“The iOS development is not a surprise given Apple announced its iOS 17 features at the WWDC in June. This suggests many businesses are looking to update their apps to adapt to the new features available for developers. An increase in Network Administration tells us businesses may be facing an increase in cyber security risks,” Sebastián Siseles, VP of International at Freelancer.com, told Moneycontrol.

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The declining skills show the demand for IT-related jobs is declining following the rapid rise of software and app development jobs seen in 2022 as a result of mass tech layoffs, he added.

Concerning the city-wise distribution of the freelancing projects, Delhi is leading with 26 percent) of the jobs, followed by Mumbai (17 percent), Bengaluru (16 percent), Kolkata (16 percent), and Hyderabad (13 percent).