Indeed reports an increased demand for web development, cloud computing and the use of big data tools.
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Indeed, a new report was published on Thursday with the most important trends in technical skills in the company. These trends cover multiple facets of the technology landscape, including web development, cloud computing and big data, the report revealed.
SEE: Building an effective data science team: a guide for business and technical leaders (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
Indeed’s Technical Skills Explorer Part 3: Big Picture Technical Skills Trends Report analyzed a list of more than 500 technical terms to query job descriptions of vacancies on Indeed. The analysis took into account bookings between September 2014 and September 2019 to determine which technical skills and topics experienced the greatest growth over time.
The job vacancy website recently published reports on the above timeframe; the studies identified the 20 fastest rising and sharpest falling technical skills and the top 20 general technical skills of the past five years. This latest report goes further and delves into how these skills formed three major trends in the tech world.
The three trends
1. JavaScript innovation
According to the report, front-end web development has grown rapidly, and the JavaScript framework is consistently keeping pace with a revolution in the creation of web applications.
Every year JavaScript releases an updated framework for the latest technological innovations. The report analyzed the fluctuations in JavaScript skills over the past five years.
“JavaScript is the number 5 of the best technical skills and has steadily increased over the past 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. “Because web development tools are constantly changing, it is crucial for job seekers to understand what the fastest rising JavaScript tools are and those who have fallen out of favor.”
“” Front-end developer “and” web developer “are fast-growing and very popular technical job titles, and to get those jobs you need to know both JavaScript and the relevant libraries that employers hire,” added Flowers.
Angular remained the most common JavaScript library, with steady growth since 2014. jQuery was once in first place, but has fallen by 30% in five years; Ajax followed a similar trajectory, fell by 54%, the report showed.
“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 is also another implementation philosophy,” said Flowers. “Angular.js is open-source and is managed by Google, with an active contributor community. In short, Angular.js has been successful because it was early in the MVC revolution and has a healthy developer culture.”
Building on that pattern, “jQuery and Ajax are JavaScript tools of a generation before the MVC style of web development became popular. So because more JavaScript development is done under a different philosophical / organizational umbrella (MVC), these tools are struggling to adapt to Angular, React and Vue, “Flowers said.
Looking at the past year alone, Vue.js saw the largest growth of 72% and is expected to grow even more in the coming years. However, with the speed at which web development is changing, predicting popular associated technologies can be a difficult task, the report said.
SEE: Programming languages: JavaScript developer reveals their favorite tools (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
2. Cloud computing and containerization
“Containerization tools enable software engineers to develop and implement code in a controlled environment (a ‘container’) that prevents a number of common problems, such as consistent software dependencies and controlling versions of said software,” said Flowers. “In addition, containerization tools enable applications to aggressively and automatically scale up depending on user load. So for dynamic web applications, in particular, containerization allows more agile management of computer resources.”
The report found that Docker and Kubernetes were the fastest growing container skills that have been demanded in the past five years.
Along with those containerization tools, cloud computing products also saw significant growth, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure rising, according to the report.
“Cloud computing tools are becoming increasingly popular as computing power in the cloud becomes cheaper and more user-friendly and technicians respond to the benefits of their work in the cloud in a shared environment, rather than their own management with servers and databases in local (physical) machines “Flowers said.
SEE: Deploy containers: six critical concepts (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
3. Data science makes a big hit
With data scientists occupying the title of most promising job of 2019, it is no surprise that data science continues to gain ground. This growth is also visible in the increased popularity of big data tech tools, with which data scientists and engineers can handle large data sets, the report found.
The tools for big data processing that have experienced the most growth in the last five years were Redshift, Spark and Tensorflow. Programming languages designed for the use of big data have also increased enormously, with Python and R leading the way. Both grew by 12% and 6% in the past year alone, 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.
“While data science is flourishing in an ever-increasing part of the technical landscape, it’s important to know that it’s not just about software tools – it’s also about expertise in matter. So data science insight comes from (1) the know the right tools, such as Python and R and SQL, to access and manipulate data, but also (2) know how to analyze the data and text when you get it, and in a methodologically sound way, the latter requirement means that data scientist must have knowledge of machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning, etc., “said Flowers.
All three trends represent the leading technologies in the company and are valuable for those who want to enter the technical field, because according to this report, candidates could focus their skills on these popular trends.
For more information, Indeed debuts new tech recruitment platform for technology jobs at TechRepublic.
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