Contractors are a core component of the increasingly mobile IT crowd

Contractors with mobile development expertise could be enjoying growing demand. This is according to CIO magazine’s prestigious top 10 IT skills for 2016, in which the demand for the ‘mobile engineer’, with cross-platform mobile development expertise, was highlighted as buoyant.

Demand is particularly high for contractors and freelancers with skills in iOS, Android and Windows operating systems. Experienced mobile developers are also in a strong market position, especially those with knowledge of HTML5, jQuery, Java, C++, C, Objective-C and Swift, Apple’s new programming language.

Responsive Web Design

As the rise of smartphone usage across the globe continues to grow exponentially, organisations are having to invest significant sums in their mobile platforms to ensure they have a robust IT architecture to satisfy the needs of their clients. Mobile devices have now overtaken desktop PCs as the chosen way to conduct online shopping, chat on social media, apply for jobs and plenty besides.

There are now close to five billion mobile phone users globally, which equates to two-thirds of the world’s population. The global smartphone market is worth in the region of $400 billion to the big industry players such as Apple and Samsung. A recent survey and forecast by Gartner, the world’s leading IT research and advisory company, predicts that mobile phone sales will hit 2.1 billion units by 2019. And these are conservative estimates given the seemingly unquenchable consumer thirst for the latest in mobile gadgetry.

We hear the words ‘mobile friendly’ uttered frequently, often in conjunction with responsive web design (RWD), which basically means adapting your website to smartphones without losing out in the functionality and usability stakes of the larger screen version. Consumers have exceptionally high expectations and the cost of failing to deliver a state of the art mobile solution is unthinkable. The online experience must be of the highest quality, otherwise the savvy Millennials, for example, will happily go elsewhere.

Application Programming Interface (API) specialists

With more than one million apps between the App Store and Google Play, competition is fierce to stand out from the crowd. Organisations are having to not only call on Application Programming Interface (API) specialists to develop the required software but also think about usability and improving the end user experience. User experience (UX) and creative user interface (UI) designers are the ‘go to’ experts, helping make all the elements such as icons and text intuitive for the web visitor.

Providing a seamless mobile experience has to be a top priority for today’s businesses.

So, which are the ‘hot’ skills areas that employers are looking for? The ‘mobile first’ approach is imperative for success if they want to keep up with the relentless pace of technological change. What works on a desktop simply won’t cut it on a mobile system.

And potentially negative feedback can spread like wildfire on social media – the damage to a company’s reputation can take a long time to reverse. Mobile is a must, and prospects for Mobile engineers have never been brighter.