SYDNEY, April 30, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Freelancer.com, the world's largest outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace, today announced its 50 fastest growing online job categories for the first quarter of 2012 with the release of the Freelancer Fast 50.

Chief Executive, Matt Barrie, said the Freelancer.com Fast 50 pulls data from over 3.3 million users and 1.5 million projects creating the most comprehensive insight into online job trends. "We have seen a huge increase in outsourcing on the whole, with businesses rethinking their strategies moving into the New Year," Barrie said.

TOP TRENDS FOR Q1 2012:

- Outsourcing surges with a rise in business process outsourcing: Outsourcing of backoffice and non-core functionality has seen a dramatic rise in the last quarter with Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) showing the highest growth of any job category in Q1 of 2012.

- Huge increase in VA jobs as businesses focus on core activities: Virtual Assistant jobs (up by 144% to 3205 jobs) have seen a surge in this quarter. SMEs, who traditionally do office administration in-house, are outsourcing these tasks as a result of the comparatively low cost of off-shore labour.

- Mobile app development grows as smart phones show no sign of slowing: Android (up by 26% to 2,863 jobs), iPhone (up by 27% to 4,318 jobs) and iPad (up by 19% to 1,828 jobs), with "post-PC device" sales outstripping that of PCs and a slew of new models hitting the market, the number of jobs in these areas has seen a steady increase.

- Open Standards will own the Web: HTML5 (up 48% to 2,160 jobs) continues its ascent as the de-facto Web 2.0 standard. The continued growth of "post-PC" devices and their support of next generation open web standards.

- Losers: SEO (up by 8% to 10,152 jobs) has remained comparatively stagnant. Despite a stronger recovery for SEO in late 2011, Google's constant fight against low quality link building has had a major impact on the SEO industry.

View Full Press Release : http://press.freelancer.com.s3.amazonaws.com/2012-04-26-Freelancer-Fast-50-Q1-2012.pdf

SOURCE Freelancer.com