The April Online Work Index reveals that IT and marketing skills continue to dominate the online work landscape as the Top 10 graphic clearly demonstrates.

Beyond the general demand for technology and marketing skills, businesses are clearly chasing domain expertise in open source technologies, help with delivering world-class user experiences, and insiders with savvy working with social media.

• Open Source on the Rise: The overall trend of businesses migrating to open source technology solutions is stronger than ever with PHP (#1) programming now topping the Index followed closely by MySQL (#2). Demand grows for a variety of other open source skills including Joomla (#18), Drupal (#48 – up 10 spots), osCommerce, (#49 – up 20 spots), Ruby on Rails (#73 – up 27 spots), and Linux (#74 – up 13 spots).
• User Experience Paramount: With more pressure than ever for companies to compete with world-class user experience, hiring trends show accelerating interest in technologies that deliver and enable great customer experiences, such as HTML (#3 – up 3 spots), Flash (#10 – up 2 spots), AJAX (#12 – up 14 spots), JAVA (#16 – up 13 spots), and – the biggest mover on the list – Actionscript (#56 – up 43 spots).
• Social Media Rising: Social media continues to gain mainstream traction as companies strive to connect with customers, drive traffic, and become part of the online conversation with their communities of users, partners and even prospects. Demand for professionals skilled in developing for Facebook, Twitter, and blogging applications is surging. WordPress (#15) and Blogs (#19) crack the top 20, while Social Networking (#38) moves up 6 spots, Facebook (#61) is up 10 spots and Twitter (#93) makes its debut on the Index.