Article first published as And the most in-demand tech skills of 2012 are … on VentureBeat.
One way to find out is by looking at the job posts. I decided to analyze recent craigslist San Francisco Bay Area job ads. It is a good proxy for the local demand. Bay Area is often a trend setter, and technologies which become popular here frequently gain broader adoption. The findings can therefore also be viewed as a leading indicator for other geographies.
Here are the key insights:
- “Mobile” appears in 30% of all ads winning 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 often mentioned CMS tool.
I run similar analysis a year ago. For the most part results were similar. There are a few notable differences:
- 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.
List of the top 50 skills most commonly featured in the job ads is shown below.
Fig 1. Top 50 Technical Skills in Demand
Methodology:
- I run a term frequency analysis on job posts which appeared on craigslist in the SF Bay Area Internet Engineering category between 1st and 31st of January 2012.
- Count reflects number of posts a term appears in. Multiple mentions of the same term in a single post count as one.
Robert Tekiela
