LinkedIn Report: Top 25 Hottest Skills of 2014

LinkedIn just released their annual "Top 25 Hottest Skills" report, which analyzes the skills and experience data in over 330 million LinkedIn member profiles.

As the largest professional social media network, LinkedIn offers a pretty solid database of online resumes and recruitment activity.

In fact, CyberCoders is a partner of LinkedIn to expand our reach to over 40 million qualified candidates. Check out the full LinkedIn Top 25 Skills of 2014:

While social media marketing was the hottest skill in 2013, it didn't even make the top 25 list at all this year.

The "social media guru" craze seems to have died down quite a bit, at least on LinkedIn. Likewise, digital and online marketing took a hit as well.

One reason for this change in demand may be a result of Facebook's recent change in algorithm. Now, businesses are basically coerced into using paid advertising rather than organic to reach audiences--a huge hit for social media marketers.

Even though social media marketing is no longer top dog, SEO/SEM Marketing has made an appearance on this year's list among the top five.

Businesses may be looking to SEO/SEM managers to help them bolster their online presence without social media marketing. While marketing skills are generally still among the Top 25, the demand is geared toward the technical side of marketing. Of course, Facebook is not the end-all-be-all for social media marketing, it is still a huge component. And other popular social media sites (e.g. Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat) are largely conducive to a specific, limiting niche of businesses (e.g. retail).

It's not a big shocker that the #1 skills is all about stats and data.

As we head into 2015, Big Data is going to continue to be one of the highest paid, most important jobs because our lives are getting more and more inundated with data.

From the Internet of Things to social media activity to e-commerce websites, everything is tracked and businesses need to capitalize on the data they have.

The data scientist of this LinkedIn study, Sohan Murthy, joked via Twitter:

I promise I didn’t do anything to make my own skills look better, but I will use this as leverage to get a raise at some point next year.

— Sohan Murthy (@sohanmurthy) December 17, 2014

 

This list is a great point of reference to make a case for a raise next year. If your job or skill is on here, you should too!

Also see: Denied a Raise? 6 Alternatives You Can Ask for Instead