Top 10 Most In-Demand Skills for Software Engineers for 2016

By Brad Seraphin

As one of the leading IT recruiting firms in the nation, CyberCoders has accumulated a wealth of data relating to the most in-demand development skills for job seekers.

As a follow up to last year’s article, 3 years of data (2013, 2014, and 2015) has been analyzed to yield 10 trends that provide skill demand insight for software engineers in 2016.

1. Java remains atop the list as the most demanded skill companies were looking for in 2015. This trend proceeds Java’s 2014 dethroning of C++, the most demanded skill of 2013.

2. SQL consistently remains in the top 3 most demanded skills year after year. After 2 years as the 3rd most demanded skill, SQL moved up to 2nd most demanded skill in 2015.

3. Javascript, which was the 4th most demanded skill in 2013 and 2014, cracked the top 3 most demanded skills in 2015.

4. C++ continues a downward trend from 2014 when it dropped from 1st to 2nd, dropping from 2nd to 4th most demanded skill in 2015.

5. Python placed just outside the top 5 most demanded skills in 2013 and 2014, but finally cracked the top 5 most demanded skills in 2015, coming in at the 5th most demanded skill of the year.

6. C#, which had placed just above Python as the 5th most demanded skill in 2013 and 2014, dropped to the 6th most demanded skill in 2015.

7. Linux consistently ranked as the 7th most demanded skill in 2013, 2014, and 2015.

8. MySQL took a dip in 2014 after moving from 8th most demanded skill in 2013 to 9th most demanded skill, but then rebounded to 8th in 2015.

9. C/C++ fell from 9th most demanded skill in 2013 out of the top 10 in 2014, but then reclaimed the 9 spot in 2015.

10. .NET was absent from the 2013 top 10 of most demanded skills, jumped to 8th in 2014, and then fell to 10th in 2015.

While the trends found in the CyberCoders data are expected to hold strong in 2016, we will also see a substantial growth in the popularity of emerging technologies being used by companies like Google, Apple and Facebook and many start-up companies. The proliferation of these trending technologies should not be ignored, nor should their implications on the software development industry.

Jeff Fulton, who manages digital development for one of the world’s largest toy companies and is a former Senior Game Developer for Zynga, has 17 years of web site and game development experience, and has published several books on development. “Angular, Node, Mongo and Express make up the biggest trending platforms,” says Fulton. “I think large SQL data structures that use Oracle/SQL server are not and will not go away, but big data document databases will start to eat away more of their market share as people figure out which applications are suitable for them.”

Node.js, Mongo / NoSql databases are progressive, popular, trending technologies highlighted in an earlier 2015 CyberCoders Insights post, which mentions Angular and GoLang as bleeding the edge technologies.

Fulton’s insight into the moving pieces behind his 2016 trend expectations: “The emergence of ‘Mobile First’ is going to push cross platform App development and web development closer to technologies like Cordova/Phone Gap. Many game developers have discovered C# because of Unity for cross platform games, but .Net as a platform for web apps will start to lose ground. I also see Java making a bigger push if they figure out a way for it to compile to Swift when Swift goes open source, or Swift might take over."