Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Which IT Skills are Hot? What Job Skills Are in Demand? Is Java Dead?

Getting a Great Java Job

A good friend of mine is interesting in changing careers, and getting a good, solid job in the Information Technology (IT) industry. Being a technical trainer myself, my buddy Kev and I are going to work together to help him develop all of the key technical skills that he needs to land a great job in the Java programming and development industry.

Should I Learn Java or C++ or .NET or C#...

Of course, sitting over a Tim Hortons cup of coffee, Kev asked if he should be learning C++ (pronounce C plus plus), or if learning Java was a better path to take. He also mentioned C# (pronounced C Sharp) and he's also got friends that program in .Net (pronounce 'dot net'). Of course, Kev doesn't want to waste any time learning skills that aren't in demand, and I think that's a good strategy.

Anyways, the discussion reminded me of a post I made on the Big Moose Saloon at the JavaRanch. You see, there's a great website that allows you to query various skills that are requested in job postings - everything from garbage picker to WebSphere Admin (which some might actually argue is the same thing), and you can get a kewl graph of what the demand is, and how the demand is changing. The graph for plotting job skills demand over time is at www.indeed.com.

.Net vs. J2EE: Sun vs. Microsoft

An interesting statistic is that .Net has a much higher demand for jobs than J2EE, with .Net sorta being the equivalent of J2EE for Microsoft.

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Job Demand for C vs. Java vs. C++ vs C# Skills

Of course, what my buddy asked was really about C programming skills demand vs. Java programming skills demand. Here's the graph:

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Interestingly, demand for C skills remains high, even growing in Sept. 2006, so there's clearly alot of C code hanging around, which really doesn't surprise me at all. But the demand for Java skills is steady, and almost looks like Java skills is equal to C++ and C# skills combined.

I could just play with this required job skills graphing program all day. Here's a neat graph I created comparing various Java development technologies:


JSF vs. Hibernate vs. EJB vs. Struts vs. Seam vs. GWT Job Skills Demand

I'm really actually surprised to see the demand for Struts to be so high, and JSF so much lower, but I guess it's similar to the C programming scenario - Strtus, like C, has been out there for a long time, and as we can see, even if more people are chosing Java, there will always be lots of C, C++ and Fortran or Cobol code that needs to be maintained and updated.

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