Customer service, copy typing, bookkeeping, academic writing and data processing.
Freelancers, take note ofthese skill sets, as these saw the highest spike in demand globally in the second quarter of 2019, according to the recent Fast 50 Report by online job marketplace Freelancer.com.
Fast 50 charts the quarterly movement of the top 50 fastest growing and declining job categories on Freelancer.com, which has over 34 million people across 247 countries on their platform. For the second quarter of this year, Freelancer.com’s data scientists and engineers went over 430,000 jobs on the site and analyzed the latest job trends.
Based on the report’s fastest-rising job skills, two particular trends were evident: first is companies’ shift to a leaner, more distributed workforce and the second, the rise in skill sets related to big data and artificial intelligence.
Taking the top spot on the Fast 50 list is customer service, which saw an almost 55 percent increase in demand from the year’s first quarter to the second. This could mean that while artificial intelligence is all the rage among companies when it comes to customer service (such as the use of chatbots to respond to inquiries online), people still want human connection.
Along with the rise in demand for customer service, the increased demand in copy typing and bookkeeping jobs is indicative of the leaner workforce trend, says the report, since both are administrative tasks that can easily be handled by freelancers, allowing companies to streamline their processes.
Demand for copy typists (those who transfer handwritten notes to an editable format) rose by 50 percent, while the number is almost the same for bookkeepers.
“It’s clear that organizations are seeing the value of focusing their efforts on high-value tasks,” the report reads.
The second trend is influenced by the rise in demand for freelancers who specialize in data processing (39 percent), the application React Native (38 percent), statistical analysis (37 percent), machine learning (37 percent) and algorithm (32 percent).
Data processing, usually done by data scientists, “is a vital step in creating machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
The ability to analyze and visualize data trends is a popular skill as well, in the era of big data.
One top job skill category, however, stands out from the rest: academic writing. The demand for this outlier grew by over 42 percent, but the report makes note that this could be due to the fact that the end of colleges’ and universities’ academic calendar occurs during the second quarter of the year.
Access the full Fast 50 Report on https://s3.amazonaws.com/press.freelancer.com/Fast%2050%20Q2%202019.pdf.