The Next Job, Part I: Skills In Demand

I'll be the first to confirm that there is no such thing as "job security". It used to be that if you did something unique or very few people did what you do, you were safe. It used to be like that for me, until our company was bought out by another. Suddenly everything changed, and my position is scheduled for elimination in March 2015. Never mind that what I did will remain, probably assigned to somebody that has no experience with it.

But I'm not one to bemoan spilled milk: I quickly came up with a strategy for landing my next job. It comprises of 4 steps: (1) determining what skills are "hot" in the industry, (2) reviewing the skills I have, (3) attaining any new compelling skills, and (4) determining how I'll identify my next job. That last step is important: you don't want to apply for anything that comes across your radar just because you have the skills it requires.

For the last 4 months, I have tallied the general categories of skills or qualifications in jobs posted at Dice, Glassdoor, SimplyHired, Indeed, Careerbuilder, and LinkedIn. The jobs match a general search query "java+web+developer+software+engineer", and I only tallied the ones I could reasonably apply for, even if I did not have all the required skills. Additionally, I got a torrent of job matches arrived via the armies of IT recruiters out there, almost as soon as I posted on the first job site. Fortunately, their matches are closer to what I am looking for (except for the relocation).

Below are the results of what's hot in my nexus (step 1), skills that I should know if I will be highly marketable. They are sorted by relative importance, with must-haves at the bottom. It says, for example: "there is three times as much demand for ORM frameworks (such as Hibernate) than there is for portal technologies (such as portlets or iFrames)" among the jobs I could do. The data shows that I should care little about the skills at the top; the ones at the bottom are my best bet. The next question then is: which of these skills do I have (am I sure about or expert at)? Future blog post.