Technology is progressing at a breakneck pace these days. Software developers, engineers and other tech workers have to work hard to stay on top of today’s emerging technologies. And when they look for jobs, they often use search terms that describe cutting-edge skills associated with the jobs they want.
On the employer side, the highly specialized tech talent who have these proficiencies are in great demand. To find this talent, many recruiters search Indeed’s resume database. Thus, analyzing job seeker and resume search data shows which emerging tech skills are sought after now by jobseekers and employers respectively—while also giving a glimpse of the skills that may be hot in the future.
To determine the tech-skill terms with the fastest growth in job seeker search activity, we examined two years of tech job search traffic. We then combed resume search traffic during the same period to see how popular those skills were among employers. The runaway winners among job seekers were React and cloud computing, which also rank high in employer resume searches.
React is a JavaScript library used to create user interfaces in applications, maintained primarily by Facebook. This technology is growing explosively. For example, so far in 2017, the React project has had the second-highest number of contributors on Github, a platform used by developers to share code and build businesses.
On Indeed, React is by far the tech skill search term with the highest growth in job seeker search activity. At the same time, its use by employers more than tripled. That shows how rapidly React is gaining popularity among consumer-facing technology companies and how vital proficiency in it is for front-end developers. Simply put, experience with React has become essential for many tech jobs.
Meanwhile, cloud computing is also growing by leaps and bounds. In our list, two cloud operations—Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure—round out the top three on the job seeker search side and also posted double-digit gains on the employer side. Cloud is gaining because businesses of all stripes are boosting their use of off-site computing and storage—and that’s making experienced cloud developers a must-have for many employers.
On the job seeker side, most of the terms on our list of fast growers were related to software, technology platforms and programming languages. In that sense, number five on our list stands out—it is Mandarin, the dominant spoken and written language in China. The rise of Mandarin as a job seeker search term illustrates the impact the world’s second largest economy is having on the US tech industry. The most popular tech job postings clicked after using Mandarin as a search term were for product developers, language analysts, and customer support specialists. However, Mandarin’s growth as a search term was not mirrored on the employer side. It lost considerable ground in the resume search database.
Lastly, Python, one of the fastest growing programming languages, made an important showing directly and indirectly in our job seeker search term list. As a search term, Python ranked 14th. However, Microsoft Azure in third place, Spark in ninth place and Django in 12th place all incorporate Python to some degree, so its importance as a skill is greater than its standing on its own indicates. At the same time though, the volume of employer search activity for Python fell in our resume database.
The ever-evolving tech industry keeps generating new software and tools, which means tech workers can never stop developing their skills. Our list of search terms with the highest growth in job seeker search activity offers a window into what tech workers and employers think are today’s essential skills and what may be the vital skills of the future.
Methodology:
The time periods used to measure year-over-year growth in search activity were October 2015 to September 2016 and October 2016 to September 2017. We isolate tech job search by focusing on job seekers that clicked on jobs that fall within our definition of tech titles and pulled the top search terms used to get the job seeker to a tech posting. We removed low volume queries from the first time period and then calculated year-over-year growth. The list of search terms with the highest growth was then curated for those terms we believe represent actual skills.
