eLearning Developer — Income and Opportunity

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What is an eLearning Developer?

The eLearning developer is responsible for the technical implementation and deployment of the learning material created by, for example, an instructional designer or teacher.

This involves activities such as setting up an eLearning system or course management system, creating code for interactive exercises or quizzes, and taking care of the technicalities of user management and access restrictions.

What is the Role of an eLearning Developer?

As an eLearning developer, you’re responsible for course design, delivery, UI/UX, user management, interactivity, and learner interaction. Your goal is to help learners reach their goals as efficiently as possible using the perfect toolset and learning assets at the right time and in a seamless way.

In practice, this often means optimizing the learning management system (LMS) or using artificial intelligence to enrich the quality of the learning assets and the timing of their presentation to the learners.

⏱️ Tip: Timing is crucial! Great learning material presented at the wrong time is as worthless as bad learning material.

What is the Annual Income of an eLearning Developer in the US?

💬 Question: How much does an eLearning Developer in the US make per year?

Average Income of an eLearning Developer in the US by Source
Figure: Average Income of an eLearning Developer in the US by Source. [1]

The expected annual income of an eLearning Developer in the United States is between $58,210 and $75,460 per year, with an average annual income of $95,353 per year and a median income of $97,600 per year.

This data is based on our meta-study of 8 salary aggregators sources such as Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, and PayScale.

SourceAverage Income
Glassdoor.com$62,037
ZipRecruiter.com$71,724
Talent.com$74,100
Zippia.com$88,397
PayScale.com$58,958
Comparably.com$58,210
SalaryExpert.com$66,268
Salary.com$75,460
Table: Average Income of an eLearning Developer in the US by Source.

🧑‍💻 Note: This is the most comprehensive salary meta-study of eLearning developer income in the world, to the best of my knowledge!

Let’s have a look at the hourly rate of eLearning Developers next!

What is the Hourly Rate of a Freelance eLearning Developer?

eLearning Developers are well-paid on freelancing platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr.

If you decide to go the route as a freelance eLearning Developer, you can expect to make between $25 and $95 per hour on Upwork (source). Assuming an annual workload of 2000 hours, you can expect to make between $50,000 and $190,000 per year.

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How Much Should I Charge as a Freelance eLearning Developer?

  • ⭐ As a beginner eLearning developer, you should charge $20-$30 per hour on freelancing platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr.
  • ⭐⭐ As an intermediate eLearning developer, you should charge $30-$60 per hour on freelancing platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr.
  • ⭐⭐⭐ As an expert eLearning developer, you should charge $60-$120 per hour on freelancing platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr.

Industry Demand

But is there enough demand? Let’s have a look at Google trends to find out how interest evolves over time (source):

source

Both keywords “eLearning” and “eLearning Developer” have seen significant growth in interest during the last two decades. The field is likely to grow in the next couple of decades, so the industry demand is very attractive.

What Skills Do I Need as an eLearning Developer?

Figure: A skill you don’t need as an eLearning developer.

These are the top 15 most important skills you should have as a successful eLearning developer:

  1. Flexibility in mind and thinking—the field changes rapidly!
  2. Programming skills
  3. Technical skills in the industry for which you create eLearning systems are helpful but not strictly required.
  4. Understanding eLearning authoring tools
  5. Web development skills such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript
  6. Ability to use gamification and game economics to keep learning exciting
  7. Editing graphical assets such as photos and videos
  8. Understanding design principles and UI/UX best practices.
  9. Good teaching skills
  10. Course creation skills
  11. English language skills
  12. Pedagogic skills
  13. Initiative and creativity
  14. Ability to work with others
  15. Communication skills

Learning Path, Skills, and Education Requirements

Do you want to become an eLearning Developer? Here’s a step-by-step learning path I’d propose to get started with eLearning :

You can find many additional computer science courses on the Finxter Computer Science Academy (flatrate model).

But don’t wait too long to acquire practical experience!

Even if you have little skills, it’s best to get started as a freelance developer and learn as you work on real projects for clients — earning income as you learn and gaining motivation through real-world feedback.

🚀 Tip: An excellent start to turbo-charge your freelancing career (earning more in less time) is our Finxter Freelancer Course. The goal of the course is to pay for itself!

You can find more job descriptions for coders, programmers, and computer scientists in our detailed overview guide:

The following statistic shows the self-reported income from 9,649 US-based professional developers (source).

💡 The average annual income of professional developers in the US is between $70,000 and $177,500 for various programming languages.

Question: What is your current total compensation (salary, bonuses, and perks, before taxes and deductions)? Please enter a whole number in the box below, without any punctuation. If you are paid hourly, please estimate an equivalent weekly, monthly, or yearly salary. (source)

The following statistic compares the self-reported income from 46,693 professional programmers as conducted by StackOverflow.

💡 The average annual income of professional developers worldwide (US and non-US) is between $33,000 and $95,000 for various programming languages.

Here’s a screenshot of a more detailed overview of each programming language considered in the report:

Here’s what different database professionals earn:

Here’s an overview of different cloud solutions experts:

Here’s what professionals in web frameworks earn:

There are many other interesting frameworks—that pay well!

Look at those tools:

Okay, but what do you need to do to get there? What are the skill requirements and qualifications to make you become a professional developer in the area you desire?

Let’s find out next!

General Qualifications of Professionals

StackOverflow performs an annual survey asking professionals, coders, developers, researchers, and engineers various questions about their background and job satisfaction on their website.

Interestingly, when aggregating the data of the developers’ educational background, a good three quarters have an academic background.

Here’s the question asked by StackOverflow (source):

Which of the following best describes the highest level of formal education that you’ve completed?

However, if you don’t have a formal degree, don’t fear! Many of the respondents with degrees don’t have a degree in their field—so it may not be of much value for their coding careers anyways.

Also, about one out of four don’t have a formal degree and still succeeds in their field! You certainly don’t need a degree if you’re committed to your own success!

Freelancing vs Employment Status

The percentage of freelance developers increases steadily. The fraction of freelance developers has already reached 11.21%!

This indicates that more and more work will be done in a more flexible work environment—and fewer and fewer companies and clients want to hire inflexible talent.

Here are the stats from the StackOverflow developer survey (source):

Do you want to become a professional freelance developer and earn some money on the side or as your primary source of income?

Resource: Check out our freelance developer course—it’s the best freelance developer course in the world with the highest student success rate in the industry!

Become Freelance Developer (Course)

Other Programming Languages Used by Professional Developers

The StackOverflow developer survey collected 58000 responses about the following question (source):

Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year?

These are the languages you want to focus on when starting out as a coder:

And don’t worry—if you feel stuck or struggle with a nasty bug. We all go through it. Here’s what SO survey respondents and professional developers do when they’re stuck:

What do you do when you get stuck on a problem? Select all that apply. (source)

To get started with some of the fundamentals and industry concepts, feel free to check out these articles:

Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory. Let’s get some practice!

Coders get paid six figures and more because they can solve problems more effectively using machine intelligence and automation.

To become more successful in coding, solve more real problems for real people. That’s how you polish the skills you really need in practice. After all, what’s the use of learning theory that nobody ever needs?

You build high-value coding skills by working on practical coding projects!

Do you want to stop learning with toy projects and focus on practical code projects that earn you money and solve real problems for people?

🚀 If your answer is YES!, consider becoming a Python freelance developer! It’s the best way of approaching the task of improving your Python skills—even if you are a complete beginner.

If you just want to learn about the freelancing opportunity, feel free to watch my free webinar “How to Build Your High-Income Skill Python” and learn how I grew my coding business online and how you can, too—from the comfort of your own home.

Join the free webinar now!

References

[1] The figure was generated using the following code snippet:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import math

data = [62037,
        71724,
        74100,
        88397,
        58958,
        58210,
        66268,
        75460]

labels = ['Glassdoor.com',
          'ZipRecruiter.com',
          'Talent.com',
          'Zippia.com',
          'PayScale.com',
          'Comparably.com',
          'SalaryExpert.com',
          'Salary.com']

median = np.median(data)
average = np.average(data)
print(median, average)
n = len(data)

plt.plot(range(n), [median] * n, color='black', label='Median: $' + str(int(median)))
plt.plot(range(n), [average] * n, '--', color='red', label='Average: $' + str(int(average)))
plt.bar(range(len(data)), data)
plt.xticks(range(len(data)), labels, rotation='vertical', position = (0,0.45), color='white', weight='bold')
plt.ylabel('Average Income ($)')
plt.title('eLearning Developer Annual Income - by Finxter')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

Developer Humor

Q: How do eLearning developers and instructional designers explain the Birds and the Bees to their children?

A: By the end of this conversation you will be able to do the following:
  (1) Identify the main components that make someone attractive
  (2) Employ appropriate decision-making strategies to determine the correct level of romantic engagement
  (3) ...

🥱