7 Surprising Trends That Show What Tech Skills You Need to Succeed

IT salaries are up after a two year decline, according to CIO.com. That’s good news, considering the level of dissatisfaction IT professionals are experiencing.

Meanwhile, hiring is up as well. Dennis B. Moore has analyzed listings from Dice.com and found an overall increase of 6.1% growth in the past three months, and a 46.2% increase over the past year. Moore looked at four areas: database, applications, languages and platforms. Moore found some surprising results.

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Here are some of the biggest surprises. Keep in mind that these are just the results for one job board and may not be representative of the industry overall:

• Hadoop grew slower than other NoSQL related technologies. However, there were still more Hadoop jobs than there were jobs in every other NoSQL technology combined. Also, traditional RDBMS technologies are still the most popular, with the most jobs and strong growth.
• Demand for Oracle eBusiness Suite skills dipped. Oracle’s database, unsurprisingly, remained strong. SAP experienced the most growth in the applications area in the past three months, followed by PeopleSoft.
• Silverlight overtook Flash. Silverlight experienced 12.6% growth in the past three months, while Flash experienced just 2.2%. Silverlight also surpassed Flash in total number of jobs, with 982 job listings for Silverlight and 646 for Flash.
• Demand for iPad skills decreased by 3.5%. However, iOS demand increased by 24.9%. Moore didn’t tracked Macintosh or OSX demand in the past so he couldn’t make a comparison.
• Android had 1,019 jobs, which beat iOS’ 832 jobs. But iOS is growing faster, at a rate of 24.9% to Android’s 19.8%.
• There was an increased demand for skills in Facebook and Twitter.
• Azure was the fastest growing platform, with 80.7% growth. But it still trailed Amazon in total number of jobs 1,019 to 103.

The five programming languages with the top growth in the past three months were:

1. HTML5 (45.2%)
2. SAP Sybase PowerBuilder (26.0%)
3. Ruby (15.8%)
4. Python (15.8%)
5. Silverlight (12.6%)

PowerBuilder grew quickly, but only had 155 jobs total. Assembler also experienced strong growth at 12.2% in the past three months, but only had 212 jobs. Moore didn’t rank Node.js separately from JavaScript, so there’s no indication of how quickly it is growing.

“There was such strong demand growth for all skills, that it is more useful in this category to speak about the area of weakest growth – Adobe Flash,” Moore wrote.

The top languages, by total number of jobs, were:

1. Java (16,152 jobs)
2. HTML (9,736 jobs)
3. XML (9,651)
4. JavaScript (9,618)
5. C# (7,940)

Take aways:

• Microsoft professionals are doing well, with strong growth in C#, Silverlight and Azure.
• Java is still sitting pretty, as expected.
• SAP is rebounding.
• Oracle database skills remain vital, but other Oracle applications are questionable.
• Demand for CRM skills are in decline, with Siebel, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics all taking hits in the past three months.
• NoSQL is a small but growing niche.
• You can’t go wrong with HTML5 and JavaScript.

Photo by Aldo Gonzalez

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