ZDNETLinkedIn is an interesting company. Since the early 2000s, it’s been the home of everyone’s resume-of-record on the internet. It’s a social network with feeds and followers. It’s a learning hub. And it offers a wide variety of job-hunting and job-filling services.Also: Want a programming job? Learning any language helps, but only one is essentialIn fact, when I last looked at programming language popularity based on job openings, LinkedIn vastly exceeded Dice and Indeed, offering 2.3 million programming jobs compared to 34K on Dice and 56K on Indeed. On its About page, the company proclaims itself to be “the world’s largest professional network with more than 1 billion members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.” Since 2016, LinkedIn has been a subsidiary of Microsoft. As you might imagine, with so many members, so many job listings, and being a subsidiary of Microsoft, LinkedIn has both the job-related data to crunch and the predilection to do data analysis. In January, the company released its Jobs on the Rise report, which listed the 25 fastest-growing jobs in the US. In today’s AI-centric world, it’s no surprise that AI engineer and AI consultant filled the top two slots. But the top 10 list also included physical therapist, travel advisor, and security guard, indicating the cross-sectional nature of LinkedIn’s source data. Today, the company is drilling down past job titles to skills. If you’ve ever been on LinkedIn, you know the company catalogs skills for each individual member — not only those the member chooses but also those suggested by each member’s professional contacts. Also: LinkedIn’s new AI tool could be your dream job matchmakerThankfully, a few of my contacts think I’m skilled at writing, for example. Oddly enough, sarcasm hasn’t been listed as one of my skills on LinkedIn. In any case, today LinkedIn is releasing its Skills on the Rise report. This report derives its conclusions based on three factors culled from LinkedIn’s vast pool of job-related data: skill acquisition, hiring success, and emerging demand. Skill acquisition reflects how often LinkedIn members add a given skill to their profiles. Hiring success reflects the skills attributed to members who have been hired in the past year. Emerging skills is a measure of how many new job listings incorporate the skill. Lies, damned lies, and statistics All of these factors measure growth rate, which is the percentage increase year-over-year. It’s important to note that the methodology described by LinkedIn for their rankings does not mention weighting the growth rate. This is a concern because unweighted growth rates can skew the interpretation of overall growth. For example, let’s say that Python programming went from 500,000 to 750,000 listings. That’s a 50% growth rate. Now, let’s say that Fortran (a very old and mostly obsolete programming language) went from 20 listings to 40 listings. That would be a 100% growth rate. Also: AI roles take top 2 spots on LinkedIn’s list of the 25 fastest-growing jobs in the USDisplayed without weighting, you’d list the 100% growth rate item (Fortran) as much more popular than the 50% growth rate item (Python). But obviously, there’s vastly more demand for Python programmers than Fortran programmers. Engineering skills on the rise All this is to say that the job skills I’m about to discuss make some sense, but don’t make major career or educational changes solely based on this one list. Do your research, study what’s going on in your field, and keep reading ZDNET. With that caveat, here are LinkedIn’s 2025 Engineering Skills on the Rise in the US. More
