Wednesday, February 15, 2012

And the most in-demand tech skills of 2012 are …


And the most in-demand tech skills of 2012 are …

One way to find out what skills will be in highest demand this year is to look at job posts.


I decided to analyze recent Craigslist San Francisco Bay Area job ads. It's a good proxy for the local demand. The Bay Area is often a trend setter, and technologies that become popular here frequently gain broader adoption. So the findings can also be viewed as a leading indicator for other geographies.


Here are the key insights:



  • "Mobile" appears in 30% of all ads, winning the popularity (or hype?) contest.

  • Java continues to lead the pack among the development languages, followed by Ruby, Python, and PHP.

  • MySQL is by far the most commonly mentioned relational database.

  • NoSQL is featured prominently. Hadoop is first on the list of NoSQL databases, followed by Cassandra, Redis, and MongoDB.

  • Linux has little contest among the operating systems. Ubuntu is mentioned more frequently than CentOS.

  • Android is mentioned slightly more often than iOS/iPhone.

  • jQuery is the most commonly mentioned JavaScript framework.

  • Spring continues to be the most commonly mentioned Java framework.

  • Git outranks subversion among the source code management systems.

  • Selenium is the most frequently mentioned testing tool.

  • Drupal is the most frequently mentioned CMS tool.


I ran similar analysis a year ago. For the most part, the results were similar. But a few differences are worth noting:



  • Demand for mobile skills is accelerating. "Mobile" and "social" had similar mention frequency last year. This year "mobile" mentions are far ahead of "social".

  • NoSQL skills requests increased significantly.

  • PHP mentions went down, Ruby went up.

  • Git overtook subversion.

  • Flash/ActionScript mentions went down.


The full top 50 list of tech skills most commonly featured in Craigslist posts follows. The counts reflect the number of posts a term appears in. Multiple mentions of the same term in a single post count as one. Counts reflect listings in the SF Bay Area Internet Engineering category between Jan. 1 and 31, 2012.


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