he economy is changing at a lightning pace—and skill requirements for jobs are changing right alongside it.
“Entire industries are disappearing almost overnight, and legacy companies are quickly changing course,” Jeff Selingo wrote last year, noting that the pace of change made it difficult for colleges and students to keep up.
That might be part of the reason why soft skills are suddenly in wide demand, Rachel Bowley writes on LinkedIn‘s blog. In fact, 57% of business leaders say soft skills are more important than hard skills, according to a survey released earlier this month by the company. Based on that survey and member profile data, LinkedIn identified the most in-demand soft and hard skills of 2018.
According to LinkedIn, the most in-demand soft skills are:
- Leadership
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Time management
And the most in-demand hard skills are:
- Cloud and distributed computing
- Statistical analysis and data mining
- Middleware and integration software
- Web architecture and development framework
- User interface design
- Software revision control systems
- Data presentation
- SEO/SEM marketing
- Mobile development
- Network and information security
- Marketing campaign management
- Data engineering and data warehousing
- Storage systems and management
- Electronic and electrical engineering
- Algorithm design
- Perl/Python/Ruby
- Shell scripting languages
- Mac, Linux, and Unix systems
- Java development
- Business intelligence
The list of in-demand hard skills reflects the rise of software engineering and data analysis over the past few years. Studies show that 95% of employers say data science skills are hard to find among candidates, and that by 2021, students with data science and analytics skills will be twice as likely to get a job.
Increasingly, people who aren’t dedicated statistical analysts are finding themselves using data science in their jobs. More than 400,000 job postings required data analysis skills in 2016, according to research from EAB and Burning Glass (Bowley, LinkedIn blog, 1/11; Petrone, LinkedIn blog, 1/2).
