Perusing the Dice.com Report of Hot (and Not) Tech Skills for 2016

I've been looking at a variety of data sources for determining so-called "hot skills" for IT professionals lately, doing research for my own series of related stories. Thanks either to persistent searching or dumb luck, I recently discovered a skills demand map compiled by IT employment facilitator Dice.com.

This interactive chart comes from Dice.com, and graphs out the various IT skills that organization tracks in its multitude of job postings in heat map form. Source: What's Hot (and Not) in Tech Skills (Feb. 1, 2016)

This gem appears in the context of an article entitled "What's Hot (and Not) in Tech Skills," published on Feb. 1. What makes this map/chart so interesting occurs at its upper boundary, which skews upward from right to left.

In the version posted above, the items of greatest interest appear in shades of red, to indicate those that are hottest — that is, those that are, at present, most heavily demanded by employers.

The chart I used for the graphic is something of an abstraction, however: If you visit the Dice Data archive where I found it, and try to dig into any detail on it, you end up moving to a much more densely populated chart called "Skill Demand."

That one's not as pretty to look at, but it contains a great many more data points, as well as all of the information details it illustrates. If you visit that chart for yourself, you'll be able to explore it in detail.

Here's what I elicited for the red points thereupon, roughly from left to right:

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If you take the time to count these items up (some of which admittedly overlap, to lesser and greater extents), you'll find that there are 36 of them altogether. That's a lot of different data that points to some interesting skills nexuses of potentially great interest to IT professionals.

These include a large variety of programmer/developer skillsets (including languages, platforms, and some tools), an almost equally large variety of information security topics, a collection of database and Big Data related elements, and some IT management and strategy miscellany.

There's considerable food for thought here, and it's worth checking out, especially while the data it reflects still bears some relationship to the current reality on the ground. As I see this chart, it's of greatest value for those interested in software development, and pondering where to invest their intellectual capital in skills development.

If that describes your current career explorations, then by all means, check it out!