Source: techrepublic.com
Indeed released a new report on Thursday detailing the main tech skills trends in the enterprise. These trends cover multiple facets of the tech landscape including web development, cloud computing, and big data, the report found.
Indeed’s Tech Skills Explorer Part 3: Big Picture Tech Skill Trends report analyzed a list of more than 500 tech terms to query job descriptions of postings on Indeed. The analysis considered postings between September 2014 and September 2019, determining which tech skills and subjects experienced the greatest growth over time.
The job posting site recently released reports spanning the above-mentioned time frame; the studies identified the 20 fastest-rising and sharpest-declining tech skills and the top overall 20 tech skills of the past five years. This latest report goes further, diving into how these skills formed three key trends in the tech world.
The three trends
1. JavaScript innovation
Front end web development has seen rapid growth, according to the report, and JavaScript framework consistently keeps pace by revolutionizing the creation of web applications.
Each year, JavaScript releases an updated framework to handle the latest innovations in technology. The report analyzed the fluctuations in JavaScript skills over the past five years.
“JavaScript is the No. 5 top tech skill, and has risen steadily over the last five years. But the specific libraries/frameworks that use JavaScript have been more dynamic–some have risen, while others have fallen,” said Andrew Flowers, economist at Indeed Hiring Lab and author of the report. “As the tools of web development are constantly changing, it’s crucial for job seekers to understand what are the fastest-rising JavaScript tools, and those that have fallen out of favor.”
“‘Front end developer’ and ‘web developer’ are fast-growing and very popular tech job titles, and to get those jobs one needs to know both JavaScript and the relevant libraries employers are hiring for,” Flowers added.
Angular remained the most common JavaScript library, with steady growth since since 2014. jQuery was once in the top spot, but has fallen 30% over five years; Ajax followed a similar trajectory, decreasing by 54%, the report found.
“Angular is a tool that uses the model-view-controller (MVC) framework for developing web applications. MVC is an organizational tool for code, and it’s also a different implementation philosophy,” Flowers said. “Angular.js is open-source and maintained by Google, with an active community of contributors. In short, Angular.js has had success because it was early in the MVC revolution and has a healthy developer culture.”
Building off of that pattern, “jQuery and Ajax are JavaScript tools of a generation before the MVC-style of web development became popular. So as more JavaScript development is done under a different philosophical/organizational umbrella (MVC), these tools have struggled to adapt to Angular, React, and Vue,” Flowers said.
Looking at this past year alone, Vue.js saw the greatest growth at 72% and is expected to have even more growth in the coming years. However, with how quickly web development changes, predicting popular associated technologies can be a difficult task, according to the report.
2. Cloud computing and containerization
“Containerization tools enable software engineers to develop and deploy code in a controlled environment (a ‘container’) that prevents some common headaches, such as having consistent software dependencies and controlling versions of said software,” Flowers said. “Moreover, containerization tools enable applications to scale up aggressively and automatically depending on the user load. So for dynamic web applications, in particular, containerization allows for more deft management of computational resources.”
The report determined that Docker and Kubernetes were the fastest-growing containerization skills requested over the past five years.
Along with those containerization tools, cloud computing products also saw significant growth, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure skyrocketing, according to the report.
“Cloud computing tools are growing in popularity because computational power in the cloud is getting cheaper and easier to use, and tech workers are responding to the benefits of doing their work in the cloud in a shared environment, rather than managing their own with servers and databases in local (physical) machines,” Flowers said.
3. Data science makes a big hit
With data scientists occupying the title of most promising job of 2019, its no surprise that data science continues to gain ground.. This growth is also evident in the increased popularity of big data tech tools, which allow data scientists and engineers to handle large data sets, the report found.
The big data processing tools that saw the most growth over the past five years included Redshift, Spark, and Tensorflow. Programming languages designed for big data use also soared, with Python and R leading the pack. Both grew by 12% and 6% over this past year alone, respectively, according to the report.
The report also analyzed the fastest growing data science disciplines. Machine learning was the clear leader in growth, followed by artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and natural language processing.
“As data science blossoms into an ever-larger part of the tech landscape, it’s important to know that it’s not just about software tools –it’s about subject matter expertise, too. So data science insight comes from (1) knowing the right tools, like Python and R and SQL, to access and manipulate data; but also (2) knowing how to analyze the data and text when you get it, and in a methodologically-sound way. The latter need means data scientist should have knowledge of machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning, etc,” Flowers said.
All three trends represent the leading technologies in the enterprise and are valuable for those looking to enter the tech field, as candidates could cater their skills toward these popular trends, according to the report.
For more, check out Indeed debuts new tech hiring platform for jobs in technology on TechRepublic.