Which tech skills are in demand now?
4 tools for figuring that out
Knowing the right skills and technologies can make a real difference in your work. Having relevant skills matters not only in your current job, but also for finding better jobs.
But it’s tricky to know which skills are in demand. They seem to change every couple of years. How can you best sort through the noise/hype and figure out which skills are truly relevant and in demand now?
Here are some free tools that could help:
O*NET
O*NET is a database/webpage maintained on behalf of the US Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration. It features information and trends on 900 (government recognized) jobs.
O*NET has a lot of information on each of those 900 jobs. The parts that relate to this article are the “Technology used in this occupation” and “Wages & Employment Trends” section for each job page. In the “Technology” section, they say what types of technology/software will be commonly used in that job. The “Trends” section gives their estimate for growth for that particular job.
As an example, the Technology section for market research analyst page looks like this:
And the trends section looks like this:
Going over these two sections on many different job pages is a good way to determine which skills are in demand.
Freelance job sites
Freelance sites like Elance and Odesk have thousands of jobs posted every day. The job listings are usually something like “I need a person with X skill(s) to do Y.” The types of jobs posted on these freelance sites are constantly changing. They therefore have a lot of data on which skills are in demand.
Odesk occasionally releases their data in blog posts. Elance actually provides a trends dashboard to show what types of skills are being asked for on their site (in both percentage growth and aggregate).
This is a helpful source and good start to understanding which skill categories are hot. But it’s not everything.
Categories like “Web Programming” or “Graphic Design” could be so many things. It’s not granular enough to really know exactly which specific skills are being asked for.
To get more specific, you can turn to Google Trends and Indeed Job Trends.
Google + Indeed Trends
Google trends shows how much people are searching for particular queries overtime. Indeed’s trends shows how common keywords are changing overtime across millions of job postings. You can use both in combination with O*NET and Elance.
Take a job/skill like “web development”. O*NET says that the projected growth for the job of web developer is growing faster than average (15% to 21% annual growth). Elance shows a growth rate of 10% for “Web Programming” jobs.
Browsing both O*NET and Elance will give you ideas of more specific skills to look out for. As an example, you come across “AngularJS”, a Javascript web framework. You can then check Google and Indeed to see if related keywords are seeing more activity.
Google Trends shows searches about it growing quickly:
Indeed shows it becoming more common in job listings:
(Be sure to check both Relative and Absolute to get a proper sense of scale. “Excel”, for instance, is barely growing, but is found in approximately 10% of all job listings.)
Combining O*NET, Elance, Google Trends, and Indeed together should give you a decent idea on which skills are growing faster than others.
This will hopefully help you choose what to learn next.
