Whether you’re an established IT professional or an aspiring one, the pressure to keep up with emerging tech and the growing demand for certain skills seems relentless.
Last year saw a rise in devops skills and open source frameworks, and while the top few skills – both in-demand and fastest growing – remained largely the same this year, some pretty exciting changes have been taking place lower down the list. Here, along with insights from Stack Overflow’s annual ‘Developer Ecosystem’ report, we run through the most in-demand and fastest growing skills in IT in 2018.
Most in-demand IT Skills
This year’s report saw the top four skills stay the same from 2016. JavaScript, Java, Python and C# (in that order) were top of the class, while others like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ReactJS skills reported massive growth. “We have seen changes in the last few years but once the technology is large the changes seem to go slower,” said Dave Robinson, data scientist at Stack Overflow.
The real showstopper this year was the JavaScript library ReactJS. This noted the most change, overtaking popular skills such as SQL and Linux and vaulting from 25th place to 6th.
The top 10 most in-demand IT skills are:
- JavaScript
- Java
- Python
- C#
- Amazon Web Services
- ReactJS
- SQL
- Linux
- .net
- Node.js
What skills are becoming less in-demand?
This year, some IT skills haven’t made the cut, with some losses bigger than others.
“Probably the most noticeable shrinking skill is PHP, becoming less in-demand than it has previously been,” said Robinson. “It is generally shrinking in high-income counties but it is growing in some non-high income countries such as Brazil and Russia.
“My guess would be that in newer companies it’s very rare to start a new business using PHP.” Last year PHP ranked 5th, however, after falling 11 places, it drops out of the top 10 into 16th place this year.
It was a similar situation for HTML, ranking 15th in this year’s report but dropping seven places a year later.
The five fastest shrinking skills are:
- PHP (-11)
- HTML (-7)
- CSS (-5)
- AngularJS (-4)
- Ruby (-2)