Mobile Development Talent Demand Outstrips Availability: Talent Neuron Study

SANTA CLARA, California, June 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Job Postings for Mobile Developers Doubled In Two Years, But Supply Growing Only At 13%

Talent Neuron, an innovative web-based Talent Planning and Management Platform from Zinnov LLC, today released the findings of its latest study on "Global Mobile Talent". The study revealed the current gap in demand and availability of skilled mobile developers across various global locations including Silicon Valley.  To address the gaps, companies are following a three-pronged approach - acquisitions, leveraging global talent hotspots by expanding their R&D footprint and vendor partnerships - to take advantage of available talent, the study found.

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The Talent Neuron study revealed that the supply of talent is definitely not being able to keep pace with demand and while job postings for mobile developers have doubled over the past two years, the number of registered developers is increasing only by 13%, thereby creating a huge gap. This rate of growth is expected till 2015.

Among the measures that companies are taking to bridge the gap; several large organizations are leveraging global talent 'hotspots' such as India, China, Israel and Europe. The majority of mobile application talent is located in EMEA (where 42% of the global top 25 cities for mobile development are located), with Finland, Tel Aviv and Moscow emerging as key locations. Interestingly, APAC is a hotspot for talent that works on the Android platform, while iOS and Blackberry developers are less prevalent in the region. The study found tremendous demand for HTML 5 development skills, which witnessed a 149% increase in job postings in 2013. This was followed closely followed by job posts for Android app developers (increased by 146%) and iOS developers (132%).

Vijay Swami, Co-Founder and CEO, Talent Neuron, said, "There is an intense war for mobile development talent, fuelled by low availability and the dynamic nature of the industry which requires constantly updated skillsets. Recruiters need to understand the underlying technology and requirements before writing job descriptions, and also understand location-specific trends. Rather than waiting for the perfect candidate, companies should aggressively leverage global locations to expand their catchment area, analyze skills of niche mobile first organizations before M&A and opportunistically leverage partners for talent (Not cost)".

However, while the US and EMEA have a matured mobile development ecosystem, with regions like the Bay Area, San Francisco, New York, London and Tel Aviv being hubs for developers who can take on high-end work, cities like Sydney, Tokyo, Munich, Sao Paolo are 'challengers' where talent predominantly works on testing and development. Emerging cities include Beijing, Bangalore, Shanghai, Dublin and Madrid, where the ecosystem is nascent. The top 25 cities have close to 55% of mobile application talent, led by the Bay Area in the Americas, London in EMEA and Beijing in APAC. While the Americas have 45% of mobile development talent, this is followed by APAC with 30% and EMEA with 25%.                

The study said that acquisitions are another method that companies are using to bridge the talent gap. Mobile M&A activity has increased significantly last year and is expected to maintain momentum in 2013. In fact, in 2011, the total value of the deals grew by 100% from 2010 and stood at USD $18.8 billion.

And last but not the least, it read that the increasing demand for mobile application development skills is now driving universities to offer courses on the subject. These universities are located across the US and Canada (12), EMEA (nine in the United Kingdom, one each in Sweden and Finland), Australia (five) and India (one), the study revealed. An example of company-university partnership is the investment by Microsoft of $24 million in the three-year AppCampus app development program in Aalto University at Finland.

About Talent Neuron

Talent Neuron is an innovative web based talent planning & Talent Management Platform Talent Neuron helps HR, engineering, strategy and other corporate leaders track and take data driven decisions on global talent, location, peer group footprint and cost related strategies.  

Leveraging Big Data principles and Predictive Analytics methodologies, Talent Neuron enables companies to Plan, Build and Optimize their global talent.  Talent Neuron also consolidates HR data across multiple systems, provides characteristics of their employees, assists in hypothesis validation and delivers real time benchmarking metrics. Data across Talent, Cost, Peer Group Footprint, Location Parameters and Current Trends are captured through 25 different primary and secondary sources. Over 12,000 unique parameters per city are consolidated using our proprietary statistical and data correlation engines to assist our clients in their Talent initiatives.  

For more information visit http://www.talentneuron.com

Contact:
Kailash Pandiyan
Senior Lead - Marketing,
Email: Kailash [at] Talentneuron.com  
Phone: +1-281-362-2773

SOURCE Talent Neuron