idealpeople blog

A few days back, we released the relatively unamazing news that the most high-demand job position within the technology industry was in fact that of Software Engineering. Armed with this information, we thought it might be an interesting idea to work out which particular Software Development skills were in high demand last year. This is part of the forthcoming and long-awaited whitepaper on the IT recruitment market, which you’ll hear about first on the Idealpeople blog.

We started with Programming Languages - the cornerstone of a Developer’s skillset. This first batch of results covers core programming languages - so we haven’t included scripting languages or web languages - for now at least (there’s plenty more of this to come…)
We see requirements which demand expertise in a myriad of programming languages. Hardly a day passes without us hearing of some new-fangled language. Some don’t seem to last long (in terms of demand, at least). Other stay with us forever.

To start with, we analysed how many requirements we had seen involved each particular programming language as the primary skill.

The results, ranked by the percentage of all vacancies, were:

1) C# - 30.9% of all Software Development vacancies wanted this as the main programming skill
2) C++ - 21.7%
3) C - 16.72%
4) Java - 9.25%
5) Embedded C - 6.66%
6) J2EE/JEE5 - 5.68%
7) Visual Basic/VB.NET - 2.16%
8) PHP - 1.79%
9) Perl - 1.35%
10) Delphi - 1.24%

To add another layer of interest, we also factored in what we call “skill demand”. To do this, we worked out how many candidates (or potential candidates) we had in our in-house database, registered at some point in 2007 per each skill, and worked out the ratio of candidates to vacancies for each skill set. The vague idea was to find out which Programming Language was the most “in-demand”, and which vacancies would be hardest to fill. The results…

1) Embedded C - 0.93 candidates per each vacancy
2) C# - 3.14
3) C++ - 3.22
4) C - 3.27
5) Delphi - 3.65
6) Ruby/Ruby on Rails -3.67
7) PHP - 4
8) Perl - 4.28
9) J2ME - 4.35
10) J2EE/JEE5 - 4.53

What’s interesting about these stats is that a quick straw-poll around the office beforehand suggested J2EE/JEE5 as the clear favourite. The gorwth in popularity and uptake of the Java technologies has been strongly publicised, but as with all things, subjective opinions are not necessarily borne-out out when we look at data.

So what does this mean? Well, at first glance it means that if you’re an Embedded C developer, then your luck’s in! The most striking observation though is that even number if your main skill is J2EE/JEE5, then there’s still only 4.53 of you for every job out there.

We know we haven’t covered all the programming languages. For instance, we haven’t looked at Scripting Languages, and only some Web languages have been covered. This is due in part to the difficulties with getting good data (HTML for instance is often a “desired” requirement of most positions), and the fact that a comparison between something like C or J2EE with SQL isn’t really fair (the same could be argued with something like Ruby on Rails or Perl, but we’d argue these are slightly more specialist skills). Keep your eyes peeled though for similar studies over the coming days.

Of course, there is some significant skew in this data. For instance, vacancy numbers may be slightly out (sometimes we’ll treat 4 x J2EE vacancies with one company as one vacancy), and candidate numbers might be slightly out as well (because, as much as we’d like it to be the case, not every Software Developer is registered with us…)

You can have a look at the full report here, which includes an analysis of the same data in 2006.

Happy hunting!

PS: We’re trying desperately to allow e-mail subscriptions to the blog, but have encoutered a few technical problems. If there’s any PHP developers out there willing to help, let us know!