Talent Neuron, a Web-based talent planning and management platform from Zinnov, LLC, believes data will enhance the quality of decision making in every sphere of life and business. Its goal is to enable businesses to gain a competitive advantage through predictive data models.

To this end, Talent Neuron recently conducted a study, which found that large organizations are trying to bridge the noteworthy gap between demand and availability of skilled mobile app developers.

According to the study, these corporations are tapping global talent hotspots such as China, India, Israel and Europe. It seems that the major mobile application talent can be found in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, or the EMEA region. This region contains about 11 out of the global top 25 cities for mobile development. That is a 42 percent share that goes to Finland, Tel Aviv and Moscow.

The study says that companies are taking a three-pronged approach in an effort to bridge the gap. The three prongs of the trident are acquisitions, leveraging global talent hotspots (such as EMEA) by expanding their research and development footprint and creating new vendor partnerships. This is all in an effort to take advantage of available talent.

An interesting breakdown of the study shows that Asia Pacific is the talent hotspot for the Android (News – Alert) platform. There seems to be less interest in this region for developers to work on BlackBerry and iOS apps. HTML5 development skills are what is in demand right now. The first half of 2013 shows a 149-percent increase in job postings for HTML5 developers. A further breakdown is a 146-percent increase for Android app developers and a 132-percent rise for iOS developers.

Co-founder and CEO of Talent Neuron, Vijay Swami, said, "There is an intense war for mobile development talent, fuelled by low availability and the dynamic nature of the industry which requires constantly updated skillsets. Rather than waiting for the perfect candidate, companies should aggressively leverage global locations to expand their catchment area, analyze skills of niche mobile first organizations before M&A and opportunistically leverage partners for talent not cost."

The report makes note of that fact that regions like the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, London and Tel Aviv can take on high-end work, while cities like Sydney, Tokyo, Munich, Sao Paolo are challengers where talent predominantly works on testing and development.

Edited by Rachel Ramsey