Upwork has published information on the most sought-after tech skills for freelancers in the US labour market.
New research from Upwork has revealed the highest-paying tech skills for independent professionals in the US, out of a list of more than 5,000 skills that employers are hiring for on its site.
According to the freelance hiring platform’s findings, 73pc of freelancers who moved to the independent market from a more traditional job reported having experienced a salary increase as a result of the transition.
Adam Ozimek, Upwork’s chief economist, said: “The freelance economy is a highly diverse segment of the workforce, and while it is too often associated with lower-skilled gigs, there is a significant population of knowledge workers being leveraged for critical projects that demand their specific skill sets.”
The platform recently released its quarterly index of the most popular skills in the US freelance job market, but said that this latest report shows that tech freelancers can also get well paid for knowledge and expertise in certain areas.
“The truth is that many members of this workforce are highly skilled, as evidenced by the high rates professionals are able to earn,” Ozimek added.
“Talented professionals are realising the opportunities available to independent workers and, at the same time, businesses are waking up to the fact that they can find quality talent quickly by looking outside the traditional constraints of their local markets.
“This way of working helps remove friction from the labour market by creating bridges for businesses to the skills they need. It also has the potential to help shrink the divide between booming areas with tight labour markets and other parts of the country with human capital to spare.”
Upwork’s 20 highest-paying tech skills in the US freelance market:
- Bitcoin
- Image object recognition
- Virtual machine
- SQR
- Lucene search
- OrCAD
- P-CAD
- Clustering
- DHTML
- SAP CPI
- Google Adsense API
- Oracle Integration Cloud
- Dell Boomi
- Google Experiments
- VWO
- Virtualisation
- Backup administration
- Open CV
- Expression engine
- Systems development
