The market situation of Access developers is primarily characterized by a lack of data. I don't know of any useful figures or statistic. Therefore, this remains my individual view.
Through my Access conferences and many other activities, I am one of the people with the most contacts and personal acquaintances with Access developers worldwide. I have more than 1000 active colleagues in my conference contact lists and meet hundreds in person and online every year. So I talk with many people and have been getting a lot of inquiries from both, the demand side and the supply side of the market for decades (see below). So my individual view is at least relatively broad.
1. Demand Side
1.1 Clearly decreasing demand, i.e. continuously fewer companies and organizations looking for Access work and developers. The many reasons for this are beyond the scope of this article.
1.2 Due to the mass distribution of Access from the smallest companies to still very many large corporations and organizations, there is still a degree of demand, even if it is significantly reduced compared to earlier decades.
1.3 The demanders often have problems to find qualified Access developers. For reasons see 2.3.
2. Supply Side
2.1 Clearly decreasing supply, i.e. fewer qualified Access developers looking for a permanent job or freelance work.
2.2 Due to the mass distribution of Access and its good suitability for individual developers, there are still relatively many dedicated or professional Access developers on the market, even if significantly fewer than in earlier decades.
2.3 Some reasons for the decreasing supply from the perspective of age (ORDER BY ASC):
There is almost no young blood, because students and young people have had no contact with Access for many years.
Many former Access developers have left Access due to more modern techniques and/or lack of demand and are therefore no longer available on the market.
A large and always increasing number of Access developers have retired or disappeared into ~Nirvana~ and are therefore no longer available here on earth.
2.4. Those who are available often have trouble still finding offers, jobs and contracts.
3. Conclusion and Personal Consequences
An old problem is that there were and are hardly any marketplaces, job boards, not even otherwise omnipresent agents that prominently seek or display Access skills. Of course, that didn't get any better with the reduction of both market sides.
All of this leads to the situation that in a reduced market, it becomes increasingly difficult for both sides to find each other.
On not so few occasions in recent years, I already had the impression of the Cobol effect: Old, still relevant technology, mastered by fewer and fewer developers, which thus become more and more valuable. By the way, I have increased my hourly rates. ;-)
I recently decided to better organize and publicize my 20+ year, small intermediary role in the Access job market in the German-speaking countries (about 1200 job offer/inquiry emails in my archive, two developer associations founded, countless job walls at conferences, a job web forum, etc.), and will present a talk and offer on this at the upcoming German Access developer conference AEK. I won't get rich by this - as I haven't by mediating and passing on inquiries so far - but perhaps I'll make a small contribution to improving the situation in my home market.
Work as a freelancer to earn some money on the side with my hobby. Unfortunately, I had a few bad experiences with clients or prospective clients. Many of them are not willing to pay adequately for customized solutions and underestimate the amount of time such projects require. Sometimes I think they have all watched too much CSI and really think that everything can be done quickly with a few keystrokes. 😏 The worst thing is that even completed projects were simply not paid for. Unfortunately, these experiences considerably dampen the fun as a freelancer. That's why I'm considering whether it would be better to give up contract programming.
Leider ist der MS ACCESS Markt wirklich massiv geschrumpft. Weswegen man über den Tellerrand schauen muß und dort dann leider Umgebungen findet, mit denen MS ACCESS bei weitem Schlagbar ist.
The vast majority of them who want an application for their needs do not care about the way. Second they will not use it for anonymous public use but for the needs of their stuff and employees. So even if the users work remotely from home as the times dictate there is the vpn that ms access works brilliant without the need of a web application development. I have tried it. And of course if you are on IT and support the backend of your company's needs then it is your every day Swiss army knife. Sometime came to me the general manager and told me scared: I need a database application in 6 hours and to has all the…
Sadly, this matches my experience perfectly. Over 10+ years as an Access Developer I've seen fewer and fewer jobs/positions/freelance projects that specifically require MS Access expertise. Yet there are practically no other tools that match Access in its flexibility (though I have looked at one that comes really close: FileMaker). That is what has kept it alive for so long and which IMHO is the reason it has so many die hard fans. However, there are substantially less people interested in it today, because Microsoft has been lazy and not put in the work required to further develop the product. Access is great at solving business problems on a LAN, but as soon as the necessity to synchronize across the…
I get asked by a lot of my students where they can find jobs requiring Microsoft Access, and to their disappointment, my answer is usually "nowhere." Most companies that can afford a full-time IT guy generally use "big boy" databases and look down on Microsoft Access, mostly because they don't understand its capabilities. But I don't have to preach that gospel to everyone reading this website. What I do tell my students is that you'll want to go out there and look for small businesses, and even some midsize businesses, that don't have the budget for a full-time, on-staff IT guy but need someone to help them with their data needs, whether that's working on their existing database or building…