But despite the plethora of options — or, rather, because of it — New York-based Thinkful believes it can still make a splash with its three-month-old online learning startup.

Launched by Darrell Silver and Dan Friedman, one of the first recipients of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowships, the startup combines education content already available online with one-on-one tutoring and mentorship. It opened its doors at the end of 2012 and on Tuesday said that it had raised $1 million in seed funding from Peter Thiel’s FF Angel, RRE Ventures, Quotidian Ventures and others. Thinkful also said it’s the first startup founded by a Thiel Fellow to receive funding from Peter Thiel.

“We launched Thinkful because we saw that the skill sets we need to be productive workers are changing so quickly,” said Friedman. “I saw this in my peers — as they discovered what work they love, there’s this huge gap in the skills that they need to get these jobs and there aren’t great ways to fill those gaps.”

For $750 for three months (or $250 a month, in case students want to move at a faster or slower pace), students on Thinkful get online access to instructional videos and other content, a cohort of students with similar goals and a personal mentor. To start, students complete a skills assessment, which helps Thinkful create a custom curriculum. Then, throughout the course, they meet with their mentor weekly, communicate with their peers and have the option to attend daily office hours, all online.

Content is a commodity; the experience makes the difference

But, interestingly, unlike most other online education companies, the startup doesn’t produce its own content. It pulls in mostly free content from across the web, from sources like Codecademy and others, but it is open to paying as well. For example, it has a partnership with CodeSchool to access the startup’s paid lessons. Instead of competing with other providers of instructional content, Friedman said his company is complementary.

“There’s just a limitation to something that’s primarily about learning in the browser and watching videos,” he said. “We have a much more deep educational experience and we consider them potentially partners.”

To Thinkful, he added, quality online content is a commodity and it’s more like the “textbook” for the course. Any given student will spend just 20 percent interacting with content (online videos, browser-based lessons or text) and the other 80 percent completing projects guided by trained Thinkful mentors, who are domain experts with field experience and, ideally, teaching or tutoring experience.

I agree that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel if good content exists and that one-on-one instruction will likely lead to better course completion and engagement rates. But I wonder how the providers of the free content will react as the startup grows. For now, Thinkful is small and new — just 30 students have enrolled, with five completing a course so far. But as the startup adds users and increases profits, its relationship with companies that create the content could be tested.

On one hand, Thinkful could say that given all the possible free content — from places like Khan Academy, Codecademy, LearnStreet and others — it is giving content providers exposure to new users. On the other hand, over time, content providers might feel entitled to a piece of the profit made from the use of their content (or something in-kind).  Friedman said they don’t know how the relationships will play out long-term but emphasized that it wouldn’t change their business. And he added that the CodeSchool partnership shows that they’re willing to pay for high-quality content. Even though Thinkful only focuses on web development for now, Friedman says it has plans to expand into other subjects.

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It would be convenient to fault the candidate for not conducting a proper, modern job search. But not me – I blame it on technology.

Resume spam

Human resource experts will tell you that for any one job posting, they receive hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes. As a result, they’re able to spend just six seconds evaluating each resume, typically scanning only the candidate’s education and their last job. Such a brief perusal means candidates who are a good fit for a company’s culture or who can bring a different and much-needed fresh outlook can easily fall through the cracks. There is simply not enough time in the day to wade through all the resumes that flood the inbox.

The resume deluge started when businesses began to rely on online job boards to find candidates. With a few clicks of the mouse, job seekers were suddenly able to upload their resumes and cover letters and then apply to dozens of jobs at a time – sometimes even more than once. This “spray and pray” strategy has completely clogged up the system. Just last month, Facebook announced a new jobs app that, at launch, boasted it already offered users access to 1.7 million job opportunities. You can imagine how that will only compound the problem even further.

The adoption of digital databases to conduct the initial winnowing has done little to stem the tide. Job seekers know now to litter their resumes with the right key words to game the automated systems and grab recruiting eyeballs. It’s no surprise then that, on average, 66 percent of applicants for a given job meet the minimum qualifications. The current system is set up to deliver the wrong people to prospective employers. This bottleneck has meant a huge financial drain on businesses. Millions of man-hours are wasted sifting through inappropriate or unwanted resumes, costing a company on average $5,504 and up to six months per hire. Conversely, job seekers now spend a median of 19 months looking for the next position.

A technological solution

So how can we make labor markets move more efficiently and effectively, for the benefit of all? The solution is a technological one – big data. (Full disclosure: My company Bright.com specializes in software that uses big data to connect job seekers with opportunities. We’re joined by companies like Path.to and TalentBin, both of which are trying to make job searching more simple and intuitive with the help of big data.)

Big data can help recruiters find the right candidates to interview by cutting through the noise created by the chaos of the current job search process. Big data tools such as modern distributed file systems and map/reduce/clustering techniques make large data sets accessible and more easily analyzed. Five years ago this simply wasn’t economically possible. Back then, it was cost prohibitive to purchase enough computer servers to make these calculations, and further, vendors were constrained by the physical size limits of data centers.

Now, vendors can process billions of transactions in the cloud at a fraction of the cost of local servers. Thus, employment-related data, regardless of size, can be leveraged to find subtle patterns reflecting a current candidate’s qualifications.

Another added benefit is the reduction of human bias. All human recruiters, regardless of background, bring a bias to the resume evaluation – it’s human nature. Big data algorithms, though, are blind to names on resumes that may surface a job applicant’s race, ethnicity, religion or gender. Machine-learning algorithms, utilizing large implicit- and explicit-feedback datasets, can be trained to simulate decisions made by professional recruiters and thus reduce or eliminate evaluator bias.

As a result, big data allows for a multi-faceted statistical approach to the filtering process at the first level, and thus helps identify better candidates from a deeper pool.

To be clear, this isn’t to say big data can replace a job interview. The interview is about culture fit, body language, eye contact, voice intonation, and the discussion of a general fit between the job seeker and the position. Technology can’t solve that on its own. Technology can, however, make sure that candidates you bring in for an interview are the best qualified, right from the first screening.

The job search is not rocket science. But the application of data science and big data can streamline the process so interviews are filled with the best fit candidates more quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost. Big data can revolutionize the labor space.

Steve Goodman is CEO of Bright.com.  

Photo courtesy of Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com.

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One might calculate the jobs impact of data centers by considering a company that uses its data centers to offer search, mail, video, apps, compute, storage, or other services over the Internet. A large data center might have from 100 to as many as 300 on-site employees. And a large company might have a dozen such data centers, or perhaps a few more, which works out to a couple of thousand jobs. Good, but not earth shattering in today’s economy.

Such a simplistic calculation misses the larger point, however. Although the data centers are but one element of a collaborative organization that includes research & development, marketing, sales, service, and support, those couple of thousand on-site positions help such a company to employ tens of thousands more on a full-time basis offering the services delivered from those data centers, even after adjusting for employees in non-services divisions. Eliminate the data centers and there goes the service delivery; no services, no revenue; no revenue, no jobs. To put it another way, data centers are the physical embodiment of a digital services business that employs many more people than the on-site staff.

Even that argument doesn’t tell the whole story. After all, such companies also have part-time employees, and hire temps, consultants, general contractors, and so forth. Procured components or systems such as chips and storage must be designed, manufactured, distributed, and supported, creating more jobs upstream in the supply chain.

The income from those tens of thousands of jobs also serves to create even more jobs. Presumably, virtually every employed worker pays part of his or her salary to pay taxes and thus employ federal, state, and local government workers or drive stimulus projects that employ still other workers in the private sector. And, most employees buy clothes, order lattes, pay for utilities, and so on. Economists refer to the marginal propensity to consume: the percentage of an additional dollar of disposable income that people will spend, thus creating other manufacturing or service jobs. For example, someone who is deeply in debt and earning minimum wage may have a low marginal propensity to consume, paying down debt rather than rushing out to buy goods and services.

But, in the realm of high tech and data centers, UC Berkeley economics professor Enrico Moretti argues that so-called innovation jobs have a substantial  multiplier effect. He calculates that each job in an innovation industry creates five additional jobs indirectly. A high-tech employee might use part of his or her income to retain a lawyer, who in turn engages an architect, who hires a landscaper, who patronizes a restaurant, and this process continues, ad infinitum. I would argue that it may not be innovation per se that creates the high multiplier, but rather that innovation and high technology jobs (as well as jobs in other professional disciplines, writing bestselling novels, professional sports, etc.) are likely to offer pay higher than minimum wage, and therefore, as higher-paying jobs, correlate to a higher marginal propensity to consume, and thus a greater multiplier effect.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly pay in the “Data Processing, Hosting, and Related Services” subsector is more than four times the federal minimum wage.

Consequently, if we are assessing job creation, we shouldn’t just be looking at how many people happen to be walking down the aisles of data centers at a given moment, but the total employment impact—full-time, part-time, and indirect—of high-tech firms whose entire service portfolio is delivered via those data centers. In addition to those firms, in today’s increasingly competitive economy, it is hard to find a company in other sectors, like hospitality, healthcare, petrochemicals, and transportation, among others, that doesn’t in some way benefit from IT either for basic table stakes (say, reservation systems, patient records, logistics, customer relationship management) or to achieve some sort of competitive advantage: think better movie recommendations, more realistic computer graphics animation, faster equities trading, richer customer experiences. This IT, whether delivered through enterprise data centers, outsourcing or managed or cloud services, can help create or preserve jobs as well. Then, there are the pure-play companies in the multi-tenant data center and interconnection space (such as my employer, Telx) which employ not just on-site data center staff, but sales, support, operations, product management, and so forth.

If a firm were a person, one might argue that the data center is its brain. The human brain only weighs an average of three pounds, and thus accounts for only a few percent of body weight, yet uses 20 percent of the body’s oxygen and 25 percent of its glucose. It’s tempting to complain about energy use or to argue that something that only accounts for a few percent doesn’t play much of a role, but this is hardly the case. Similarly, rather than considering only the few percent of a company’s staff that is employed in a data center, understanding the big picture requires considering the enormous multiplier effect that a company’s brain—its data center(s)—has on the whole corporation. In the example discussed, a couple of thousand jobs enable hundreds of thousands of others.

As the world increasingly exploits information technology for innovative services and competitive advantage, the data center is playing a rapidly expanding role in job creation and preservation and the health and recovery of the broader economy.

Joe Weinman is a senior vice president at Telx, the author of Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, and a regular guest contributor to GigaOM. You can find him on Twitter@joeweinman.

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Screenshot of Causecast for Employees (click to enlarge)

That’s where a new software platform built by Los Angeles-based startup Causecastcomes in. This week Causecast debuted its Employee Impact Platform, a web-based program that connects companies and their employees with non-profits and charitable causes. With Causecast, employers can select a group of causes to which they’ll provide matching donations to whatever employees give. The platform can also be used to organize company-wide volunteering events. Non-profits plug into Causecast for free, and companies are generally charged a flat rate of around $5 per user per month.

Causecast founder Ryan Scott walked me through a demo of the new platform. To me, the best part to me is how easy Causecast makes it to spend extra-curricular time with your co-workers doing something other than going out for happy hour drinks. Non-profits of course will benefit from more companies donating time and money to their causes — but according to Scott, companies benefit a lot as well. He put it like this:

“Employees who aren’t engaged with their jobs aren’t as productive. And it sounds counter-intuitive, but you often have to leave the office to become more engaged with your work, and with your co-workers. Volunteering is a really great way to get everyone together outside of the office to do something bigger than themselves.”

Causecast, which was founded in 2007, currently has 30 employees. Thus far, Causecast has been self-funded by Scott, who first became known in the late 1990s for co-founding NetCreations, where he created and patented the “double opt-in” process that propelled the email marketing industry. After selling NetCreations in an all-cash deal in 2001, Scott said, he decided to find a way to merge his desire to do some good in the world while still staying active in business.

When Causecast first launched, it was an online platform to let all people contribute to charitable causes touted by celebrities and brands. The shift into the enterprise space is a smart one, as small businesses are becoming increasingly important parts of the employment landscape and the general public is calling more and more for corporations to behave responsibly. With Causecast, small businesses can compete with larger, more established companies when it comes to offering their employees ways to give back. It’ll be interesting to see how the new iteration of Causecast takes off in the months ahead.

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But one startup has discovered an interesting way of finding potential new employees in an extremely cost-effective manner. Quixey, which created a smart search engine for discovering apps, has put up a coding puzzle online that offers a small cash prize for engineers who can fix a bug in a famous algorithm. But winners could also get the chance at winning a job with the Palo Alto, Calif.–based startup.

The Quixey Challenge, as it is called, is now in its third run, following previous contests in October and December. As part of the challenge, candidates who can solve the coding puzzle in less than a minute win $100 and a Quixey T-shirt. Anyone can take part, but it’s not as simple as just signing up and winning some quick cash. Those who wish to participate in the challenge must first complete three practice puzzles to qualify. Once they do, they will be given a chance to solve the main puzzle.

For Quixey, the challenge has served as a great lead-generation tool for finding new engineers. The startup has been in the process of hiring since raising a $3.8 million funding round last August. But instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a recruiter for each new hire, the startup has invested a fairly small amount in cash prizes instead.

For instance, in the most recent contest, which took place in December, 38 people passed the Quixey Challenge. From that challenge, Quixey is in discussions with 5 serious candidates for up to 3 open positions, according to co-founder and CTO Liron Shapira. So it has spent about $3,800 to attract those candidates, compared with about $20,000 per employee that the startup would have had to pay for a recruiter.

The Quixey Challenge not only helps weed out talented engineering prospects but also helps introduce potential employees to what Quixey is. Shapira said that for a small company in Silicon Valley, getting the attention of talented engineers when the competition includes major companies like Facebook can be difficult. The market is so flooded with jobs in Silicon Valley, Shapira said, that just getting qualified applicants into the first part of the hiring funnel was a major challenge.

In figuring out how to raise its profile among candidates, the Quixey crew thought, “What will get engineers excited?” It turns out that giving them a problem to solve and offering up some cash was a great motivator. Shapira said it was like the company had “invented crack for engineers.”

We will see how many engineers get hooked this time around: The next Quixey Challenge takes place on Thursday, Jan. 19, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, but interested coders can sign up immediately and qualify by taking the practice puzzles.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Steve Jurvetson

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In a stiff hiring environment like this, once-uncommon perks like free lunch, snacks, massages and foosball tables are practically required. How can a startup, or even a larger tech firm, attract top engineering talent? Here are a few ways that companies are trying to set themselves apart:

• Matchmaker, matchmaker: Anyone who applies for an engineering position at online dating site Zoosk between August 3 and September 30 and gets hired will be put into the running to win a date with either Samantha or Steve, two actors who starred in recent Zoosk TV commercials. Zoosk says it will cover all of the costs of the date, including a round-trip flight to Los Angeles, a chauffeured limousine and dinner. Sure, it’s gimmicky, and it plays into the stereotype of the dateless programmer — but it does sound like fun.

• All vices welcome: Remember the days when hosting an open bar was enough to get a roomful of tech industry talent? Nowadays, event organizers have upped the ante significantly. Take the super luxe party Silicon Valley event planner 50Kings is throwing the night before the Techcrunch Disrupt conference opens in September. From the invite: “We’re taking over the home of a prominent member of the Paypal Mafia and turning it into our very own private casino. Real tables, pro dealers, cocktail waitresses, strict security and high-stakes play. Serious tech players are flying in from Seattle, LA, Las Vegas and we even have an RSVP from an NBA All-Star. The party is on us, but there is a significant minimum table commitment.” Work hard, play hard, indeed.

• Entrepreneurship 101: It seems counter-intuitive, but several startups have taken to providing their employees with classes on starting their own companies. The New York Times has reported that real estate website Redfin gives regular classes on entrepreneurship at its headquarters in Seattle. Similarly Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and the current CEO of mobile credit card processing startup Square, gives his employees regular talks on topics such as how to raise venture capital. The thinking is, savvy engineers are likely to get the itch to start their own companies. Giving them the tools to learn how to do so in house may entice them to keep working as employees for as long as possible before they strike out on their own. And in this environment, whatever keeps engineers on your team is a good thing.

Of course, nothing lures in potential employees quite like cold hard cash. Financial incentives such as high salaries, solid stock option packages and lucrative bonuses are a given — and they’re getting bigger by the day. This infographic from Focus.com provides a great snapshot of today’s salary situation:

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Tess Aquarium.

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The New Yorker profile hints at these topics, rather than exploring them directly, but within the nine pages of the article, Sandberg’s decisions about going to Facebook, her leadership style, the life she has created in order to be the COO of a hot startup and the reaction she gets from women and her employees all paint a certain picture. Here’s a good example of how Sandberg views her work, from when she was evaluating moving from Google to Facebook:

“It was like dating,” says Dave Goldberg, Sandberg’s husband and the C.E.O. of the online company SurveyMonkey. Sandberg says they asked each other, “What do you believe? What do you care about? What’s the mission? It was very philosophical.”

It was philosophical, because the professional class today doesn’t join a company with a nine-to-five work ethic anymore. They are also joining a group of people that they will spend long hours with either at the office or online. They’re entering a relationship with these people, so those people better mesh with their values and ideals.

Work has become like a family

This isn’t just at Facebook. Many workers have been forced by an uncertain economy and an overall shift in employment to become more entrepreneurial, which means there are more people setting their own agendas and hours. But as Generation X and the millennials rise in the workforce, there also more people who are motivated and driven by their own goals, rather than a company’s goals.

So we have a shift in why people work and how they choose their jobs. How do you build a company and a culture that works with this shift instead of against it? Clearly forcing people to work from nine to five in a cube seems like it would be destined for failure, especially since self-motivated employees generally work best when left to follow their own ideas and projects. So options such as telecommuting, Google’s famed 20 percent time or Facebook’s Hackamonth are good for providing outlets for entrepreneurial people.

But I don’t think that goes far enough. I believe work is changing to be more like a family. Just like in families, where there is an ethos around everyone pitching in and working toward a common goal, a company needs to have people who are all dedicated toward a company goal. I’m not talking about some hokey mission statement, but rather a tangible result that everyone agrees with. At GigaOM, it’s delivering good analysis on major stories. We’re all pulling for the same thing, together. This also means people are more willing to work longer or odd hours when needed, because they believe they’ll get time off when they need it. Employees have a loyalty to the company that is rewarded with loyalty back to the employee.

And if something falls apart, just like your home-family, your colleagues will support you. In startups and entrepreneurial workplaces, there’s very little blaming and throwing people under a bus because of their “family values.” It may seem idealistic, but smart, creative people don’t have to hang around in bad environments, and they often won’t. In the Sandberg profile, plenty of people mentioned her ability to push junior staff members forward and encourage people to succeed. That’s the style of leadership required for creating these workplaces.

Today’s professional class are driven by their own goals, so like Sandberg did with Zuckerberg, they look for a deeper connection with their workplaces. They are looking for a good fit — in lifestyle and culture besides merely previous experience and career goals — not just a job. This change is seen as a good — especially within the tech community.

Not everyone wants two families

But there’s a darn good reason most people don’t want two families. It divides your loyalties, and it’s hard to prioritize when you have divided loyalties. To accommodate this, there needs to be a corresponding cultural shift in the home, something the Sandberg profile also illustrates.

She said, “The No. 1 impediment to women succeeding in the workforce is now in the home. . . . Most people assume that women are responsible for households and child care. Most couples operate that way — not all. That fundamental assumption holds women back.” The second impediment is guilt, she said. “I feel guilty working because of my kids. I do. I feel guilty. In my TED talk, I’m talking to myself, too. I’m not just talking to other people. I have faced every one of those things myself.”

As women play a greater role in the professional world, they also tend to expect more from their partners at home. So when Sandberg talks about her husband sharing the workload, that’s not an idle comment — it’s essential to her success. But it also allows her husband to achieve a level of participation in his home life that many of today’s younger men say they want. And when both partners are trying to have it all instead of just women, the social dynamic changes, ideally in a way that allows more women to take on leadership roles without being stigmatized for having a family.

That works on a macro level. But it’s the day-to-day — or sometimes, minute-by-minute — conflicts that put the true pressure on both work- and home-families, making me (and I’m sure other people like me) wonder why we even bother trying to balance both. Something as simple as a huge story breaking on weekend when your husband is out of town creates instant conflict. But when it works, it’s the most satisfying feeling in the world, and as a skilled worker, I can’t imagine going back to some nine-to-five existence where my projects and priorities are dictated by others instead of something I care deeply about.

Image courtesy of the World Economic Forum.

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If you haven’t yet checked out Namesake, it’s essentially a kind of Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn-like service built around user updates and networks, but aimed specifically at helping users connect in regards to career opportunities, information exchanges and sharing of professional expertise. It shares similarities with Quora and Sprouter, too, in that it recommends subject matter experts. But this new iOS app might provide an edge for Namesake, since it really is quite well designed.

I like that Namesake for iOS keeps thing simple. Once signed in (you can’t register from the app, unfortunately), you see your Happening Now stream, which includes conversations and other events. You can also view only conversations, mentions and your profile using the bottom app menu. A read post button in the middle of the bottom bar let’s you start a conversation quickly and easily. Everything looks good, and smooth transition animations and snappy performance in general show that this iOS app was no rush job.

If you haven’t yet checked out Namesake and you think it might prove useful, the introduction of this mobile app is a good reason to take a look.

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General Employment Picture Still Shaky

The fourth-quarter Employment Confidence Survey from Glassdoor shows that both employers and workers in all fields in the U.S. are still concerned about their futures.

Employers’ expectations are highest in the South, where 49 percent expect performance to improve in the next six months, compared to 36 percent in the West, 40 percent in the Northeast and 42 percent in the Midwest. Twice as many employees in the West (15 percent) expect their company’s outlook to get worse in the next six months than those in the Northeast (7 percent) and South (7 percent).

The survey indicates that the general workforce (not just technology workers) continue to worry about:

• Reduced compensation. More than half (52 percent) of those surveyed reported that their company reduced compensation within the past six months, and 27 percent reported that their own compensation had been cut.
• Reduced health benefits. 28 percent of those reporting saw cuts in their health and dental benefits, up 6 percentage points from last quarter and 11 points from fourth quarter 2009.
• Unlikelihood of pay raises. 45 percent do not expect a pay raise in the next 12 months, while 36 percent do expect a pay raise and 19% are uncertain.
• Uncertainty about bonuses. Of those who expect a bonus, 21 percent expect it to be more than their last bonus, 47 percent expect it to be the same, and 16 percent expect it to be less. Of those who expect a bonus, twice as many men (16 percent) than women (7 percent) expect an increase in this year’s bonus over their last.
• Uncertain job prospects. Employed adults are afraid that if they should they lose their job, 33 percent are uncertain they would be able to find a new job matched to their skills within six months, which is up from 28 percent last quarter, while 34 percent believe it’s likely, and 32 percent are uncertain. Surprisingly, those currently unemployed are slightly more positive about getting a job commensurate with their skills within six months.

Technology Job Postings Surge

Two other reports seem to indicate the technology job market is more positive than the above findings would indicate.

Technology jobs fared well in the Industry Employment Trends report for December 2010 from Indeed. According to this study, postings for information technology positions grew by 82 percent over December 2009.

The most popular positions included graphic designer, program manager, technical writer, software engineer, systems administrator, and network engineer. The U.S. cities with the most postings included New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, Washington, Dallas, Austin and San Diego.

Web-Related Positions Rated Highly

The position of software engineer has been named as “the nation’s best job,” according to a study from CareerCast. The position topped the list thanks to its low stress, strong outlook for employment and income growth potential, minimal physical demands and high environmental ranking.

Other technology-related jobs in the top fifty include computer systems analyst (rated in fifth place), technical writer (26th), computer programmer (27th), and web developer (44th), And while blogger is not listed, philosopher is rated in 16th place.

How do you see your job prospects in 2011?

Image by sxc.hu user duchesssa

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According to a report from oDesk, employers in December continued a previous trend of looking to hire mobile developers, especially those skilled in developing iOS applications. The “Mobile Apps” category has jumped from 19th place to 10th over the last year. This underscores predictions made in Simon’s recent article for GigaOM Pro, “Top Remote Work Trends to Watch for in 2011″ (sub. req.), and Aliza’s discussion of the ubiquity of mobile platforms.

The three most frequently-posted job categories (unchanged from the previous year) are web programming, web design and blog/article writing. In addition, the SEO, data entry, and graphic design categories continue to be popular.

The report also showed a very large (319 percent) increase in postings for translation jobs, and for those with expertise in such languages as Spanish, German and Korean. Technical skills used in web development, such as PHP, HTML, CSS, WordPress, Photoshop, SEO, MySQL, and JavaScript, hold most of the top ten ranked skills requested. The top ten skills list also includes English and writing.

The “Online Employment Report” also found that job postings for business planning and market strategy professionals more than doubled from 2009, with a 123 percent increase in hiring.

The report shows that the three top countries of origin for contractors employed through oDesk are India, the Philippines and the U.S., followed by other central European and Asian countries, and Canada.

The report concludes that “Online work is creating an economy of opportunity — where work is not linked to location, but to skills, experience and abilities. This shift towards a flexible, on-demand workforce is becoming an established hiring model for companies of all sizes to get more done with less, scale to meet demand, and increase efficiency. For employees and contractors, this allows them to manage their own work-life balance, get paid based on merit, and access an entire world of work opportunities.”

Which of your skills are employers most interested in today?

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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