The Most Sought After Tech Skills: A Review of the Top IT Skills Currently in Demand
Posted October 6th, 2011
Green technology, cloud computing and CRM technology are gaining popularity as the demand for these skills continues to grow. What other IT skills are currently in demand?
According to a report released in 2011 by Dice. com, the United States’ leading career website for technology and engineering professionals, based on an analysis of their job listings, cloud computing leads the pack with a nearly 300% jump in demand. Dice makes an association between the boom in cloud-related applications and an increased demand for JavaScript expertise, which saw a 98% increase and HTML, which showed an 85% increase.
Skills related to information security are also in demand, as are those related to virtualization.
The report also shows that Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is among the most sought-after skills of the moment. Others are SAP expertise and PeopleSoft experience.
Further analysis from the Dice report:
- Demand for Hadoop knowledge grew slower than other NoSQL related technologies, but there were still more Hadoop jobs than there were jobs in every other NoSQL technology combined.
- Traditional RDBMS technologies are still the most popular, with the most jobs and strong growth.
- Demand for Oracle eBusiness Suite skills dipped but remained strong for Oracle’s database. SAP hiring experienced the most growth in the applications area, followed by PeopleSoft.
- Silverlight overtook Flash.
- Demand for iPad skills decreased but iOS demand increased.
- There was an increased demand for skills in Facebook and Twitter.
- Azure was the fastest growing platform.
The five programming languages with the most growth were:
1. HTML5 (45.2%)
2. SAP Sybase PowerBuilder (26.0%)
3. Ruby (15.8%)
4. Python (15.8%)
5. Silverlight (12.6%)
The top languages, by total number of jobs, were:
1. Java (16,152 jobs)
2. HTML (9,736 jobs)
3. XML (9,651)
4. JavaScript (9,618)
5. C# (7,940)
Takeaways:
- Microsoft professionals are doing well, with strong growth in C#, Silverlight and Azure.
- Java is still sitting pretty
- SAP is rebounding.
- Oracle database skills remain vital, but other Oracle applications are questionable.
- Demand for CRM skills are in decline, with Siebel, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics all taking hits in the past three months.
- NoSQL is a small but growing niche.
- You can’t go wrong with HTML5 and JavaScript.
