LinkedIn Sheds Light on High-Demand Skills by Ed Tittel
When LinkedIn bought online training company Lynda.com in April 2015, a lot of people wondered what was really going on behind the scenes. A recent post from Steve Weiss, Content Manager for Business and Data Science at Linked (formerly at Lynda.com), helps put such speculation to rest: in a self-referential bow toward data mining/Big Data/Data Science, LinkedIn has been mining the heck out of its 400-million-plus user base and watching hiring decisions made under its purview to help the company target hot education topics. What’s at the top of the list for 2016?
According to Weiss, the number one and two fields from the recent study were:
1. Cloud and Distributed Computing
2. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining: key topics mentioned include Hadoop, Hive, R, and so forth.
Good stuff to chew on when considering skills development, courtesy of LinkedIn.
Guess which topics Lynda has been focused on recently, and which ones they’ll be continuing to plump up going forward? Right-O: the very same. Weiss goes on to cite Sohan Murthy’s “25 Skills That Can Get You Hired in 2016,” which lays out the rest of that list:
| 3. Marketing Campaign Management | 14. Shell scripting languages |
| 4. SEO/SEM Marketing | 15. Mac, Linux & Unix Systems |
| 5. Middleware & Software Integration | 16. Channel Marketing |
| 6. Mobile Development | 17. Virtualization |
| 7. Network & Information Security | 18. Business Intelligence |
| 8. Storage Systems & Management | 19. Java Development |
| 9. Web architecture & dev frameworks | 20. Electronic & Electrical Engineering |
| 10. UI Design | 21. Database Management & Software |
| 11. Data Engineering & Data Warehousing | 22. Software Modeling and Process Design |
| 12. Algorithm Design | 23. Software QA & User Testing |
| 13. Perl/Python/Ruby | 24. Economics |
| 25. Corporate Law & Governance |
There’s a LOT of interesting stuff in here, not least of which is a focus on marketing titles and roles, plus an across-the-board focus on the software development lifecycle that one doesn’t usually run into from more traditional certification-oriented data feeds. It’s a nice testament to the value of mining an active and sizable online community where the jobs to be filled actually map to a marketplace of significant size and heft. I feel very comfortable pointing to this list and saying to my peers and colleagues who work in IT: here’s an interesting and valuable list of potential IT specialties in which it was worthwhile to reside in 2015, with every expectation that this will remain true into 2016 and beyond. Thanks, LinkedIn: this is great stuff!
Note:
The article was originally published by Ed Tittel @ Pearson IT Certification on January 20th, 2016. It is reproduced on this blog with an author’s permission.