🔮 State of jobs in the Metaverse 2022

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📈 Metaverse Job Trends

With the looming recession and layoffs/hiring freezes, you would think that something as futuristic and as lowly-adopted as the ‘Metaverse’ would be one of the first areas to suffer. Correct; as the graph below shows, job listings in the US/UK using this keyword in the title has plummeted since the beginning of the year - but still hovering around at least a +50% increase versus 2021 (small caveat; if the keyword is not the title it does not necessarily mean that it’s not a required skill, but likely to be correlated).

🤹 Metaverse Jobs Top-Skills

According to a survey on top-execs, these are the most-required skills, where outside of pure development, the key ones would be Business Modeling (how do we make this work), Payments (how do we get paid), Product Design (what does this look like) and Legal/Compliance/Cybersecurity (how do we get compliant and secure with data).

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📜 Metaverse Job-Titles of the present

So what are the top Metaverse jobs?

• AR / VR Software Engineers

• Product Managers

• 3D Game Designers

• Storytellers

• Hardware Engineers

• Metaverse Marketing Specialists

Other than some crazy stints where NFTs are getting jobs on their own (i.e. one of BoredApe’s NFTs being 4-D rendered in order to be hired for a live-streaming shopping event) here are some examples of companies that hired Chief Metaverse Officer (CMVO):  

• Walt Disney

• CAA talent agency

• Audit and accounting firms Prager Metis and KPMG

• Fashion brands like Nike and Balenciaga

• Sotheby’s auction house

And it also seems that Apple is challenging none other than ‘Meta' on this turf:

📜 Metaverse Job-Titles of the future

Closing off with some pure speculation, which is always fun, here’s a list of the top ‘Metaverse Jobs that will exist in 2030’:

1. Avatar clothing designers - who will decide what we dress

2. Data bounty hunters - data and control of your own will be everything, which will mean some people will mine the web to find and fix what shouldn’t be there

3. Metahuman doctors - biometric and physiological data will be tied to our avatars, meaning some test and treatments could merge digital and real worlds

4. Metaverse construct architects - design objects, places, anything

5. Metaverse event directors - how do you do PR and events in an interconnected world? Concerts and events have already been hosted on gaming platforms and will be in high-demand

6. Metaverse research scientist - a great combo of many roles that will require coding but also physics, maths and other scientific deep knowledge - to emulate our current understanding of the real world into the digital one

7. Ecosystem developer - scale functionalities that bridge online and offline

8. Metaverse safety manager - security, security, security (data, software and so on)

9. Metaverse hardware creator - a lot of the Metaverse will be based on cameras and other high-end tech

🏭 Companies and Industries Investing in Metaverse

From McKinsey’s report on Value Creation in the Metaverse, it seems like adoption and investment is growing, despite the economic (and crypto) downswing:

As for more specific areas, a good reference is this drawing of the ten layers of the metaverse, where according to each layer there would be different roles and required skills of course:

As for freelance work, interesting to see that platforms like Fiverr have seen and are still experienced the most growth in the last six months on freelancing platform where ‘NFT’ related jobs have been jumping 3,504% and artists on the site charge between $10 and as much as $5,000 per project.

Metaverse Learning Resources

So where would you go to learn some of the basics?

AIM has compiled a great list of some free and paid Metaverse Courses including:

• Introductory Metaverse Classes, Certifications

• Virtual Reality Specialisations

• User Experience Design

• Investing in the Metaverse

• Introduction to AR/VR Foundations 

And here are some of the standard job requirements that Cointelegraph highlights in 2022:

🔎 Metaverse Job Boards

Whilst there are a lot of web3/Crypto specific job boards (here a list I saw one of The Chase’s subscribers sharing):

• cryptocurrencyjobs.co

•  pompcryptojobs.com

• cryptojobslist.com

• useweb3.xyz/job

•  buildspace.so

•  web3board.io

• web3.career

• crypto.jobs

• remote.co

• defi. jobs

• Telegram group: https://t.me/web3hiring

There seems to be few specifically targeted to the Metaverse. Here are a couple:

• https://cryptocurrencyjobs.co/metaverse/

• https://uk.indeed.com/Metaverse-jobs

Obviously given how much this field is developing I would expect to review this in just a few months and see a lot of differences and additions, but please let me know in the comments if you feel you’d like to deep dive in anything in particular or have something to add from your experience!