January is when the largest percentage of LinkedIn’s members look for a new gig. So you’re probably asking yourself, “What skills are employers looking for?” Great question! To find the answer, LinkedIn analyzed all of the hiring and recruiting activity that occurred on LinkedIn in 2015, and uncovered the 25 hottest skills in 2015 that will very much likely help you to get hired.
If your skills fit one or more of these skills categories (a grouping of related skills), there’s a chance you either started a new job or attracted the interest of recruiters last year. Companies were still recruiting and hiring for these skills well into the final months of 2015, so LinkedIn’s team expects these skills will remain in-demand in the early part of 2016. This means if you have one or more of these skills, you’re likely to continue getting interest from recruiters in the new year.
Several trends stood out during the research:
- Hello, Cloud. In many ways, 2015 could be seen as the year cloud and distributed computing graduated from a niche skillset to a more prominent skillset in the global workforce. It was a very hot category in a few countries last year. But there weren’t enough members with skills like Hadoop, HBase, and Hive listed on their profiles to allow LinkedIn to rank the category on the global list in 2014. In 2015, there was a rapid increase in members worldwide listing these types of skills on their profiles.
- Data isn’t going anywhere. The top skill category last year, statistical analysis and data mining, is still sitting comfortably at #2. It is the only skill category that is consistently ranked in the top 4 across all of the analyzed countries.The world is increasingly data-driven, and businesses are still aggressively hiring experts in data storage, retrieval and analysis.
- Some skills cooled off (if only a little bit). A few skill categories dropped out of the 2015 list, due to a reduction in hiring and recruiting activity. Game development dropped from 24th to 29th, digital and online marketing dropped from 16th to 32nd, SAP ERP systems dropped from 21st to 34th, computer graphics and animation dropped from 17th to 37th, and integrated circuit design dropped from 22nd to 41st. The recruiting skill category itself dropped to 26th (from 15th), just barely missing the cutoff. Employers are still looking for these skills – just not as much as last year.
If you’ve been thinking about picking up a few of these skills, you can learn all about them on InformIt.com. Then be sure to check out the related job openings.
