Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2011/02/01/freelancer_uk_launch/

Embrace your outsourced future

What happens when we're all competing with Moldovan goatherders?

By John Oates

Posted in Channel, 1st February 2011 15:17 GMT

The impact of outsourcing and the internet means people in the UK will need to create their own jobs, rather than hope to walk into a job as in the past.

There is hardly a job left which cannot be simply and cheaply outsourced and offshored. Where once manufacturing work was sent abroad, increasingly it is design work and other added-value services which also head offshore.

Matt Barrie, boss of Freelancer.com, said: "About 70 per cent of the world's population have never been online, and most of those people earn less than £5 a day. When these five billion people come online what will that do for wage inflation?"

Barrie said the best chance of reducing UK youth unemployment was to get people to start their own businesses rather than expect a traditional job to appear.

Freelancer.com has just opened its UK doors after buying and tweaking freelancer.co.uk. The site claims to have posted 929,487 projects worth £50,272,180 since February 2004. Projects start at £20 and average less than £120. The site claims over 2 million users in 234 countries.

Example projects highlighted by the site included making a "Fan of the Month" Facebook application for the BBC's Top Gear. The broadcaster received 11 bids for the project with average charges of £554. Or sticking up 20 posters at universities in Tallinn for $50.

The site has also looked at the fastest growing skills requested by businesses.

It looked at 320,000 projects posted on the site and found PHP skills are still the most in demand – almost 62,000 projects, up 40 per cent on last year.

PHP frameworks like Zend, CodeIgniter and CakePHP all saw big growth, but not enough volume to put them into the top 50.

Demand for Microsoft skills declined – Windows Desktop apps were down 46 per cent to 1,994 projects and ASP was down 22 per cent to 4,060. Visual Basic and .NET were up six per cent and three per cent respectively.

Social applications for Facebook were up 364 per cent to 11,585 offered projects and Twitter software was up 85 per cent to 3,066 projects. ®