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January 27, 2016

Distributed Computing Tops List of Hottest Job Skills

A Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa

If you have cloud and distributed computing skills, your job prospects for 2016 are golden. That’s because those particular job skills—which parallel the rise of Hadoop and other distributed computing frameworks–topped a LinkedIn analysis of the top 25 skills to help you find a new job this year.

The sudden arrival of cloud and distributed computing as the hottest skills

in the land was somewhat unexpected, according to Sohan Murthy, the head of research for data analytics and strategy at LinkedIn (NASDAQ: LNKD).

“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,” Murthy writes in a recent blog posting.

“It was a very hot category in a few countries last year,” he says, including the United States, where it was number one. “But there weren’t enough members with skills like Hadoop, HBase, and Hive listed on their profiles to allow us to rank the category on our global list in 2014. In 2015, there was a rapid increase in members worldwide listing these types of skills on their profiles.”

But the numbers show that it was feast or famine for that  particular job skill. Cloud and distributed computing was listed as the number one job skill in Singapore, Ireland, Germany, India, and France, and was number three in China. But it didn’t even crack the top 25 in the UK, UAE , South Africa, the Netherlands, Canada, Brazil, and Australia, according to the list.

Statistical analysis and data mining dropped to number two globally, as it yielded some room to the distributed computing folks. But that doesn’t mean you should be sounding the alarm bells over the death of big data.

LinkedIn's top 25 job skills globally for 2015

LinkedIn’s top 25 job skills globally for 2015

“Data isn’t going anywhere,” Murthy writes. “Our 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 countries we analyzed. We still live in an increasingly data-driven world, and businesses are still aggressively hiring experts in data storage, retrieval, and analysis.”

Algorithm design dropped three places to number 12 globally, while it gained three places in the United States to sit at number eight on the list.  Globally, the business intelligence category plummeted 12 spots to number 18, while in the U.S. it dropped two places to number 23.

Other job skills related to big data analytics that did well on the global list include marketing campaign management (up nine slots to number 3); SEO/SEM marketing (up one slot to number 4); middleware and integration software (down three slots to number 5); network and information security (down three slots to number 7); storage systems and management (down five slots to number 8); data engineering and data warehousing (unchanged at number 11); and database management and software (number 21).

Related Items:

Is 2016 the Beginning of the End for Big Data?

Why Gartner Dropped Big Data Off the Hype Curve

Most Hyped Tech: Big Data Out, IoT In

 

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