MANILA, Philippines – Working from home to spend more time with family or avoid the daily commute and hellish traffic has been a growing trend worldwide.

With just a laptop and a stable internet connection, one can earn as much as those working in a regular office.

Want to work comfortably in your home or get a freelancing stint? Latest data from online job site Freelancer.com showed that you need to polish your writing or math skills to land an online job. Knowledge in coding also helps.

According to Freelancer.com’s Fast 50 Report, jobs aimed at developing and marketing websites were among the fastest growing areas of online work in 2018.

“Analysis of nearly two million jobs posted on Freelancer.com in 2018 has revealed that online content was king in 2018, with both the first quarter and the final quarter of the year dominated by growth in jobs focused on the creation of websites and the content that populates them,” the report states.

Writing, design, and animation jobs also surged dramatically during the year, compared to 2017.

Writing was the fastest rising job category in 2018, growing by 537.5% year-on-year. 

Academic writing also saw substantial growth over the year, claiming a place in the top 10 fastest growing skills categories for 2018.

Jobs in web development, particularly involving application programming interface (API), also saw a substantial rise. Jobs involving APIs, or the set of tools and protocols used for building application software and development of websites, grew by 352.4% in 2018, claiming over 4,600 jobs during the year.

Here are the top 10 jobs in 2018:

1. Writing
2. API 
3. Blockchain 
4. Academic writing 
5. 2D animation 
6. Social media management 
7. Blog writing 
8. Express JS 
9. Shopify 
10. Drawing 

Meanwhile, jobs that require skills in math and statistics grew the fastest during the 4th quarter of 2018.

Here are the top 10 skills needed for jobs which rose the fastest during the last quarter of 2018: 

1. Matlab and Mathematica 
2. Statistical analysis 
3. Mathematics 
4. Algorithm
5. Statistics 
6. Report writing 
7. Academic writing 
8. Electrical engineering 
9. Machine learning 
10. Shopify templates

The full report can be viewed here.

– Rappler.com