Dice analyzes massive amounts of data related to technology skills and job titles. That analysis, in turn, gives us unique insight into the tech industry, especially when it comes to supply and demand for certain kinds of jobs. For recruiters, it’s crucial to see ongoing trends in tech-job popularity. That’s why Dice created the above visualization (which is also available, with a lengthy article that delves into our methodology, in our Dice Data area). A particular job’s “hotness” can suggest rising recruiting activity related to it over the next few quarters; conversely, as an employer or recruiter, you may see a dip in interested candidates for those jobs that are in lesser demand.
Using This Chart
Clicking on the blue box in the lower-left corner will expand the visualization to full-screen. The red points on the chart are the ‘hot’ skills, while the blue points are the less-in-demand skills. The black line represents the dividing line between ‘hot’ and ‘not’, based on our dataset. You can click on a skill or title to center it, and click once more to zoom in on that item. By default, the chart uses a log scale; otherwise the dots are too close together to easily discern due to the skewed distribution. You can switch this off by un-checking the ‘log scale’ check box. If you want to find a particular skill or title on the chart, use the drop-down to locate it. ‘Reset’ resets the chart’s current zoom level. As indicated by the chart, the in-demand skills and titles (the red ones) seem to be largely focused around DevOps work, front-end development (ASP.NET, Angular.js) and Big Data (MongoDB, Hadoop, NoSQL, AWS). The less in-demand skills include some legacy technology (COBOL, Mainframe, Solaris), as well as very common high-supply skills (Windows 2000, Visual Studio). Adobe Flash seems to be on the way out (0.33 demand ratio), while HTML5 is highly in demand (2.82 demand ratio). Paired with a solid recruiting strategy, this chart can help you plan out your talent-sourcing efforts, especially for highly specialized jobs.
