100 percent rise in jobs for mobile app developers

To bridge the significant gap in demand and availability of skilled mobile app developers, several large organisations are tapping global talent hotspots like India, China, Israel and Europe, says a study.

Job postings for mobile developers has doubled in the last two years, but supply is growing only at 13 per cent, the study by Talent Neuron, a web-based talent planning and management platform from Zinnov LLC, said. 

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 said. 

"Several large organisations are leveraging global talent 'hotspots' such as India, China, Israel and Europe," it said. 

The majority of mobile application talent is located in EMEA region (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), where 42 per cent of the global top 25 cities for mobile development are located, with Finland, Tel Aviv and Moscow emerging as key locations. 

Interestingly, APAC (Asia Pacific) is a hotspot for talent that works on 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 per cent increase in job postings in 2013, followed by job posts for Android app developers (146 per cent rise) and iOS developers (132 per cent rise). 

Commenting on the findings, Talent Neuron Co-Founder and CEO Vijay Swami 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." 

"Rather than waiting for the perfect candidate, companies should aggressively leverage global locations to expand their catchment area, analyse skills of niche mobile first organisations before M&A and opportunistically leverage partners for talent (not cost)," Swami added. 

The report further noted that regions like the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, London and Tel Aviv can take on high-end work, while cities like Sydney, Tokyo, Munich, Sao Paolo are 'challengers' where talent predominantly works on testing and development. 

The ecosystem is still nascent in emerging cities like Beijing, Bangalore, Shanghai, Dublin and Madrid, it added.