App Store Optimization (ASO) Jobs And Education Continue To Grow

App Store Optimization is still a pretty new industry and there was initially a lot of skepticism as to if ASO really makes a difference in getting more downloads and if it would be of lasting value. But as people started to use our platform on a regular basis and saw results, we have been slowly been able to help people understand the value of doing proper ASO.

However, while true, we will admit that we are more than a little biased. So to take a more objective look at how our industry is growing, we thought it would be interesting to see what the ASO job and education landscapes currently look like.

We are starting to see some of our larger Enterprise customers move some of their SEO people over to doing ASO full-time, or bringing in new people, if they don't have dedicated ASO staff already. But let's see if this is just happening in our client base or if ASO is becoming or a more valuable skill set in the job market, requiring more educational resources.

Job Experience

When searching for people who have ASO related job experience on LinkedIn, we found the following:

• People with "App Store Optimization" in their profile: 564

• People with "ASO" in their profile: 34,157

When we initially did a search for App Store Optimization (without quotes) it resulted in over 7,000 results, but that isn't accurate because it doesn't search for the phrase, just the presence of each individual word. Although the "ASO" number is high, a quick review of the results showed that most of the results were correct references to App Store Optimization. There can be other meanings for the acronym, but even so, this shows that a significant number of people have worked on or are currently working on ASO.

However, this is still a very small number compared to the Search Engine Optimization related experience out there. When doing a search for SEO, we found over a million people with SEO experience listed in their profiles.

Could ASO ever get as big as SEO? Only time will tell, but it is definitely building steam.

Job Data

When looking at the job trends on SimplyHired, they only had data from between August 2012 and August 2013, but during that time, they already saw a significant increase in the number of occurrences of "App Store Optimization" in their database.

Their measurement of the number of ASO jobs seems a little more up to date. We assume that it is a year-to-date measurement, showing a 363% increase in the number of jobs listed since April 2013.

When we looked at the salary estimator on SimplyHired, they estimate that the average yearly salary of the jobs that contain "App Store Optimization" to be $72,000. Now, we don't know for sure how accurate that number is. But if it is fairly accurate, we suspect that it is on the higher side because more manager and director level employees are being expected to understand and effectively implement ASO.

More ASO Growth

Aside from jobs, there are other mainstream channels where we are starting to see ASO information emerging. For example, there are currently 20 books related to the topic on Amazon.com. This is nowhere near the number of books that you might find on PHP programming, or a topic like that, but it is a good start.

Likewise, people have started publishing ASO courses on the online education website Udemy. There are currently four courses available, with over 1,000 total students between them. Again, this is nothing compared to some of the other topics out there, but these courses never existed a few years ago and it will be interesting to see the additional growth a year from now.

Conclusion

Going forward, we should see an expansion in the number of ASO related jobs because of the general move from desktop to mobile computing. However, we are still just getting started and who knows how big this industry could get.

Likewise, ASO education is still an emerging area of study, so it is pretty limited. But we should start to see ASO get included in the training programs of companies and perhaps even the curriculum of more higher education institutions.

If your company has not started focusing on ASO yet, it is still early in the game, but don't wait too long to get on it. Get yourself or your employees educated and figure out how it works. Our blog archive is a great place to start.

Do you think that there is still room to grow in the ASO job market?