Main image of article These are the Hottest Tech Skills of December 2018
Which tech skills are most in demand? Dice recently examined data from Burning Glass’s Nova platform, which analyzes millions of active job postings, and found that a variety of tools and disciplines have enjoyed spectacular growth over the past year. Take a look at our breakdown, along with the percentage increases over the past twelve months. Remember, Nova analyzes job postings (as opposed to BLS data, for instance), so these are skills actively in demand by employers: Because there are millions of job postings feeding data into this system, the output is really broad, with an eclectic mix of programming languages, frameworks, and disciplines. Nonetheless, we can make some broad inferences here:

Core Skills Matter

While new, “hot” disciplines such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.) attract the lion’s share of attention from companies and the tech press—as well they should!—the fundamental skills remain key in employers’ minds. We’re talking about things like DevOps, automated testing, and continuous integration—disciplines and skills that any business needs to integrate into its workflow if it wants to produce products. The presence of Atlassian JIRA near the top of the list also emphasizes that companies want tech pros who know process. (For those who’ve never used it, JIRA allows teams to track issues and projects.)

Cross-Platform Apps are Big

Build once, run anywhere—isn’t that the dream, at least when it comes to apps? Developers strapped for time and resources certainly want to build apps for multiple platforms with the minimum amount of effort. That’s where frameworks such as React Native and Google’s Flutter come in, offering the tantalizing chance to build native interfaces for iOS, Android, and other platforms with much of the same code. (That being said, some companies and tech pros have severe issues with React Native; get to know the controversy.) React JavaScript came at the top of Nova’s list, with a truly stupendous year-over-year gain of 197 percent. Developers rely on the React library to build user interfaces; React Native, an offshoot framework, is used for cross-platform development. Tech pros who know how it works are clearly in demand, which makes sense: businesses of all kinds need apps and UX elements built.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still expanding its footprint, according to the Nova data. Any tech pro who interacts with the cloud should know how AWS works, and how it matches up to its competitors (i.e., Microsoft Azure, Google, and Oracle).

There’s Hope for Everyone

What’s the biggest takeaway from this data dump? No matter what you do in tech, there’s a good chance that many companies out there want at least part of your skillset. Focus on the fundamentals and shipping products, and you’ll make a great addition to any company.