The market for mobile software applications is exploding due to the rapid rise of smartphones and tablets. The popularity of these new products creates an acute demand for development talent but there are few college programs that provide opportunities for learners to develop these new competencies. This forecast offers seven recommendations for colleges interested in expanding training opportunities in mobile app development.
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The market for mobile software applications is exploding due to the rapid rise of smartphones and tablets. The popularity of these new products creates an acute demand for development talent but there are few college programs that provide opportunities for learners to develop these new competencies. Based on our findings, we offer the following seven recommendations for colleges:
Mobile applications, herein referenced to as mobile apps, are software applications that run on mobile devices, principally smartphones and tablet computers. Mobile apps allow users to achieve the utility they get from the web (e.g. email, web search, social media participation) while on the move as well as additional functions not available via the web alone. What distinguishes mobile devices and apps device and app from the desktop computers is their enabling the user to interact with the environment in new ways. An athlete on a training run is given feedback on pace, distance, altitude, and heart rate. A casual stargazer looks at the sky, aims a smartphone upwards and is instantly given the names, coordinates and other astronomical information for exactly that portion of the sky. A pub-goer enjoys a drink with friends and instead of waiting for the bill, merely issues a payment from his phone and leaves. A confounded traveler says “can you direct me to the train station?” into the mobile device and it plays the question back in the local language. Through geo-location and scanner apps, a business can track personnel and goods in real time. Think of it: you should never have to reserve a four or six hour segment of your day waiting for the cable guy again. All of these apps are currently on the market.
As mobile computing power expands, energy consumption becomes much more efficient, and sensor technology becomes smaller and cheaper, mobile apps will become much more prevalent, useful, and complex. Healthcare is particularly ripe for mobile app development. Soon diabetics may be able to monitor their blood sugar in real time, perhaps continuously, without pricks. Diagnostic surveillance in hospitals that currently require a roomful of equipment and hospital admission may soon be available on a phone on an outpatient basis. Home health care aides will use GPS-enabled electronic visit verification on their mobile devices for legal compliance and reimbursement. Mobile apps will change the way we bank, shop, interact with government, and communicate with our families and colleagues.
The mobile app market is in its infancy and it is exploding. Apple hit $1.7B in app sales in 2010 and is on track to hit $4B in 2011. Chetan Sharma estimates that mobile apps will reach $17.5 billion by 2012. According to mobile market research firm research2guidance, the market for mobile application development services—including app development, management, distribution and extension services—will grow from $10B in 2010 to $100 billion by 2015. Although these studies use different definitions for mobile development and different timeframes, the message is clear: mobile apps development is expected to become a huge business extraordinarily quickly. Mobile App Developers Job Market As fast as the market for mobile apps is growing, the market for mobile app developers is growing even faster. A snapshot of Google Trends shows us that practically no one searched for “mobile application development” prior to the end of 2008. Interest has been up and to the right ever since.
Our own observations of job posting services and a handful of industry studies reveal that the market for mobile app developers is dramatically underserved. In June 2011 Infoworld identified six IT jobs “worth chasing”. Two of them related to mobile: mobile technology manager and enterprise mobile developer. Dice, a web site for technical job postings, conducted a study, “America’s Tech Talent Crunch,” focusing on the talent needs of the IT sector in general. The organization identified mobile as one of the lead shortages and illustrated the point by comparing job postings on their site for the first quarters of 2010 and 2011. Demand was up 150-260% year over year.
The study also noted that elance.com, a website for freelancers, reports comparable increases in demand. They had 4,500 mobile app developer jobs posted in Q1 2011, more than a 100 percent increase over the prior year. Although Dice noted an ample supply of Web and Java talent, there are too few experienced developers skilled in building apps for iPhone, iPad, Android or other platforms due to their newness. The study also identified states with the most acute talent shortages. Texas ranked third in having the greatest IT talent shortage overall, behind only California and New Jersey.
A survey of Texas colleges revealed that only a handful of Texas colleges have begun offering new courses focusing on mobile app development and only one college appears to be offering full degree and certificate programs in mobile development. Several other colleges indicate an interest in offering similar courses.
Developers are eager and willing to pay for the opportunity to expand their mobile development skills sets. Case in point: World Wide Developer Conference is an Apple-related development-focused event. It is not for sales, deal-making, or networking, etc. When the event became exclusively mobile-focused in 2008, they had their first sell-out in 60 days. Every year since then registration has filled more quickly. In 2011 the 5,000 person ,$1,500 event sold out in less than a day. The pattern has been very similar for Google’s mobile developer event. The demand for mobile app training is clear, pressing, but is less pervasive in current college offerings. One of the ironies is that while there are few formal opportunities for learning to develop mobile apps, colleges themselves are advertising for developers to create mobile education apps.
In their survey, Dice asked over 250 tech recruiters what they thought was the market rate for compensation for mobile engineers and designers. According to this survey, nearly a third of employers had to raise compensation for mobile developers “higher than normal” due to the increase in demand relative to supply. A sample of Texas companies on Dice’s site are offering pay of $85K to $90K for 1-5 years of mobile development experience.
Mobile Application Development was one of eight “dream jobs” identified by CBS Money Watch. Statistics were gathered from the Bureau of Labor, salary sites, professional trade groups, and recruiters to identify eight jobs requiring no more than two years of additional training to secure a position, a reasonably large and growing number of overall jobs, and six-figure salaries to top earners in the field (generally, the top 10 percent of those employed). The study estimates mobile app development salaries of $115,000 for top earners with projected job growth of 131 percent through 2011.
Compensation data must be viewed in light of the fact that many mobile development employment opportunities are not full time. Even companies prepared to make large investments in mobile are reluctant to bring on full-time staff; instead, they are contracting with freelancers and third party development companies. Consultants typically earn more than their company-employed counterparts. In our review of two tech-related job sites, we found 40% of Texas-based posting were for full-time employment while the remainder were for full- and part-time freelance positions.
The prevalence of freelance work raises two important issues:
“The need for strong Java, HTML and general technical skills goes without saying. Developers who are steeped in the tenets of modern object-oriented programming and understand user interfaces and design patterns will have a leg up. A potentially more difficult transition is coming to terms with the new design paradigm that mobile platforms represent: In addition to recognizing that you’ll be designing apps for the smaller real estate of smartphone screens, you have to understand how users interact with their devices and grasp the need to deliver highly targeted functionality.” http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2011/110627-jobs-in-mobile-development.html
Because the mobile app marketplace is emergent, industry leaders differ widely in their opinions about what the key markets and foundational skill sets will be. C (+, ++, #) vs. Java vs. Ruby, Apple vs. Android, mobile web vs. native app, consumer app vs. enterprise apps. Luckily for today’s learners, they don’t have to guess what is going to be the winner. There are clear demands for jobs with specific skills now and these skills, if adapted overtime, will position them best to take advantage opportunities in the mobile app market as they emerge. In all likelihood the market will not evolve in a VHS vs. Betamax way; businesses and consumers have become accustomed to having diverse technology options. Where there is demand, some developer will fill it. If anything, the mobile app market is likely to become more diverse, which means a mobile app developer most certainly must have the ability to upgrade skills continuously.
Developers are already demonstrating they understand the need for diverse competencies:
“The very reasons which are driving developers to spread their bets across all and any new platforms should indicate the potential for new platforms and the sustainability of small platforms. The thesis that one dominant platform wins the mobile “war” is naive. The post-PC era will be a multi-platform era. Developers already understand this.” Horace Dediu, The Post-PC era will be a multi-platform era
Digiu provides a helpful graphic of the lifespan of mobile platforms and speculates about the near-term use and popularity of each over the next two years.
Digiu’s argument for technological pluralism is well-taken and should be an important consideration for the creation of mobile app development curricula; however, the current job market requires certain skills. For a comprehensive list of corresponding tools, languages, and competencies by platform click here.
Despite the emergence of new platforms, our analysis of job postings reveals there is as yet little demand for mobile apps using the newest platforms. This circumstance may change in the very near term and bears watching. We looked at 327 postings on mobiledevjobs.com. Current demand for specific platform and program development skills is displayed below. Seventy-five percent of the openings are for platform-specific native app developers. There were no postings seeking MeeGo, QNX, Bada, LiMo experience or skills.
Each of the platforms for mobile applications also has an integrated development environment which provides tools to allow a developer to write, test, and deploy applications into the target platform environment. While the demand for mobile app development talent appears to be acute now, things may change in the future, not because demand for mobile applications will decrease but the SDKs (software development kits) offered by platform companies (Apple, Google, Android etc.) are getting simpler to use. However, experienced, cross-platform talent will likely be in demand for some time.
Texas mobile development companies can be found at www.mobilemondayaustin.com and www.mobiledeveloper.com.
To determine the currency of DWAs and KSAs to perform in jobs involving mobile applications, the DWA Research Institute conducted an analysis of related job postings found in Texas in Help Wanted Online (HWOL). HWOL scrapes and aggregates data from electronic job banks on the Internet and forwards them repackaged to various stakeholders’ needs (e.g., by labor market, workforce investment board area, industry, etc.). Five representative jobs were found in HWOL: Lead Android/Lead Blackberry Developer; GUI Software Engineer/Mobile & Tablet Development; iPhone Developer; and Senior Mobile Developer. SkillsPass extracted a list of detailed work activities, enabling skills & abilities and essential knowledge bases from those current postings. SkillsPass also was used to then map those job components to core course requirements in the state’s postsecondary education and training guidelines, the Workforce Education Course Manual (WECM). Workbooks detailing the specific job elements for each of the job postings are linked below:
Mobile is a different case from many other tech workforce challenges in that there are few barriers to developing a program for mobile applications development. In fact, several companies with software and hardware in the mobile space have devised their own curricula and development tools, often providing them for free. A number of for-profit companies also have developed their own programs — particularly those focused on a specific device (e.g. Android or iPhone). The quality and content of these programs is difficult to discern. As such, technical schools have a number of resources to draw on as well as a number of competitors of varying quality. In addition to formal programs, there are countless informal, self-organized work groups and workshops that attract people to the field and give them the skills and market intelligence to guide their professional development. One of the most well-known of these events is MobileMonday, a national organized but locally executed group that brings new technologies to prospective developers. Meetup.com, a web service that helps people with shared interests find each other, currently lists 390 groups related to mobile applications.
We offer a few examples of mobile app development that have very different audiences, objectives and outcomes.
Collin College will offer mobile development degree and certificate programs in the Fall of 2011. Students can pursue Android Mobile Development, iOS Mobile Development, and J2ME Mobile Development tracks. The Collin College degree programs share a common core of technology and academic courses with specialized courses in each subject area corresponding to the degree program.
Common Core Mobile Technology Courses at Collin College:
For a full breakdown of each degree and certificate visit Collin College’s E-Business Development Program at :/academics/programs/ebusinessdev.html. In addition to providing mobile app development offerings to students, in July 2011 Collin College sponsored a five-day NSF-funded workshop on mobile app development for high school, college and university faculty and staff.
Midland College has offered a continuing educating class in basic application development and mobile development courses are currently under consideration at Tarrant County Community College and El Paso Community College according to survey responses. It is likely that some additional offerings exist at other Texas colleges who did not respond to the TACTE email survey inquiry.
The High Technology Institute at Austin Community College currently offers a two-part technical certification series developed and taught by adjunct faculty for iOS developers. Faculty have developed a number of mobile app specific courses:
Although formal certificate and degree programs are being offered by colleges, many of the training opportunities were and will continue to be filled by unaccredited institutions and through informal channels. Examples of these offerings include:
The International Institute of Mobile Technologies, which appears to be a for-profit education and consulting firm, offers certification for established programmers in a variety of mobile applications platforms. Students may enroll in the entire program or in individual courses. The course offerings include:
One of the most comprehensive mobile app development offerings we found is offered by Stanford University for iOS (iPhone and iPad apps). Stanford offers approximately 60 hours of free instructional podcast via iTunes. The most recent class includes the following topics:
Developing Apps for iOS
There are Android development courses in iTunes but, understandably, fewer in number and far less comprehensive. There does not appear to be analogous instructional podcasts in the Android marketplace.
The mobile device market is volatile, diverse, and in a state of flux. Despite current demand for skills to develop apps for Nokia, Palm, and Blackberry these companies are losing tens of millions of users. A half million Blackberries go out of service in the US each month. According to Gartner Inc., Android operating system will become the most popular by the end of the year accounting for a quarter of all smartphone sales in 2011. Apple will remain a powerful platform and the second most powerful operating system in the future.
Perhaps the newest technology to be added to mobile devices is near field communication. Near field communication allows devices in close proximity to exchange data such as making a mobile payment. NFC has had its ups and downs since emerging nearly a decade ago but is likely to finally become an integral part of the mobile device landscape. Although none of the job postings mentioned near field communication, NFC development will likely soon become and an essential part of mobile app development. A recent Juniper Research study predicts rapid growth in NFC services for smartphones over the next three years. There will be 300M NFC-enabled smartphones on the market by 2014, supporting in particular retail, coupons and mobile payments in North America, Europe and other developed countries.
Spectrum constraints could potentially upend the mobile app industry. One big countervailing piece of information that could turn mobile on its head is spectrum constraint. Smartphone usage is growing so quickly that wireless carriers will have enormous difficultly keeping up with spectrum use demand. One approach they are already using is to charge more for mobile data. The consensus estimate for spectrum use in 2015 will be 35 times 2009 use.