One way to find out what skills will be in highest demand this year is to look at job posts.

One way to find out what skills will be in highest demand this year is to look at job posts.

I decided to analyze recent Craigslist San Francisco Bay Area job ads. It’s a good proxy for the local demand. The Bay Area is often a trend setter, and technologies that become popular here frequently gain broader adoption. So the findings can also be viewed as a leading indicator for other geographies.

Here are the key insights:

  • "Mobile" appears in 30% of all ads, winning the popularity (or hype?) contest.
  • Java continues to lead the pack among the development languages, followed by Ruby, Python, and PHP.
  • MySQL is by far the most commonly mentioned relational database.
  • NoSQL is featured prominently. Hadoop is first on the list of NoSQL databases, followed by Cassandra, Redis, and MongoDB.
  • Linux has little contest among the operating systems. Ubuntu is mentioned more frequently than CentOS.
  • Android is mentioned slightly more often than iOS/iPhone.
  • jQuery is the most commonly mentioned JavaScript framework.
  • Spring continues to be the most commonly mentioned Java framework.
  • Git outranks subversion among the source code management systems.
  • Selenium is the most frequently mentioned testing tool.
  • Drupal is the most frequently mentioned CMS tool.
I ran similar analysis a year ago. For the most part, the results were similar. But a few differences are worth noting:
  • Demand for mobile skills is accelerating. "Mobile" and "social" had similar mention frequency last year. This year "mobile" mentions are far ahead of "social".
  • NoSQL skills requests increased significantly.
  • PHP mentions went down, Ruby went up.
  • Git overtook subversion.
  • Flash/ActionScript mentions went down.
The full top 50 list of tech skills most commonly featured in Craigslist posts follows. The counts reflect the number of posts a term appears in. Multiple mentions of the same term in a single post count as one. Counts reflect listings in the SF Bay Area Internet Engineering category between Jan. 1 and 31, 2012.

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Bob Tekiela is a cofounder and CTO of 500friends, a San Francisco-based startup backed by Y Combinator. 500friends developed a social loyalty platform for retailers. Bob also writes a blog called CTO Insights.