The most sought-after tech skills in the US jobs market are SQL and Java, according to an analysis of skills listed in job postings over the past five years.
But one of the most striking changes in recruitment website Indeed.com’s tech jobs listings over that period is Python’s growth.
This new data on Python’s rise reflects language popularity rankings that show Python is either the most popular language or on track to become it.
Job listings with Python mentioned have grown from just 8% in September 2014 to 18% in September 2019. Currently, Java was mentioned in 20.8% of listings, while SQL was cited in 21.9%.
Python’s rapid rise is often attributed to the growth in data science and the current interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence, aided by a wealth of third-party Python packages and developer tools.
Tech giants with millions of lines of Python code, such as Instagram and Dropbox, have been upgrading code to Python 3.x over the past years due to Python 2.x’s looming end of life. Python has also become essential for banking giants like JPMorgan.
Indeed’s interactive graph shows that demand for developers with knowledge of AWS has also boomed over the past five years. Today, some 14% of job listings require knowledge of AWS.
Jobs listings that mention Microsoft Azure also more than doubled but are only listed in 6.9% of postings today. Just 0.8% of job listings mention Google Cloud Platform.
Indeed Hiring Lab economist Andrew Flowers has a theory on why Python and AWS have grown so much in the past five years. Python’s share grew 123% while AWS grew a massive 418% over the period.
“Of course, software engineers and full-stack developers, to name two common tech job titles, increasingly use Python. And those same workers use AWS a lot too,” writes Flowers.
“But a big reason behind the exceptional growth of Python and AWS is that the underlying tech job mix is changing in ways that favor these programming languages.”
The other factor he attributes to the growth of Python and AWS is increasing demand for data scientists and data engineers. However, he notes that growing demand for DevOps engineers has largely fueled the rise of AWS in the data.
The top 10 skills by share of job postings in 2019 were SQL, Java, Python, Linux, JavaScript, AWS, C++, C, C#, and .NET.
