As year-end reviews go, anything LinkedIn does has the potential to be fairly interesting: after all, they have 350 million profiles with information about people’s professional backgrounds, skill sets, experiences, and connections. (And despite that, they probably haven’t made recruiting that much easier/better, although they will send a lot of traffic to your homepage.)
LinkedIn did do a semi year-in-review post on their blog yesterday, and here’s what we learned.
Here are the 10 “hottest skills” of 2014 in terms of getting a job:
(1) Statistical Analysis and Data Mining: Big Data, baby! (Even though no one really understands it.)
(2) Middleware and Integration Software: To be perfectly honest, I consider myself a semi-intelligent person, and I have no idea what this job really is.
(3) Storage Systems and Management: I think this probably means data/cloud, but it could mean old-fashioned warehouse too. I mean, Amazon is growing, right?
(4) Network and Information Security: Big deal, for sure. Remember ‘The Fappening?‘
(5) SEO/SEM Marketing: You can make an argument that SEO is kind of dumb — it’s like a game, right? — or you can make an argument that it means everything these days, because people take to Google/the web for information, and they don’t really go past Page 1 of results. (We’re all lazy pieces of trash at the end of the day.)
(6) Business Intelligence: I think this means “planning,” but I’d reckon people working within this don’t even know what they do day-over-day.
(7) Mobile Development: ‘Tis the future, for sure.
(8) Web Architecture and Development Framework: Makes sense when considering the rest of this list above.
(9) Algorithm Design: Algorithms define our lives these days; that’s not necessarily a good thing.
(10) Perl/Python/Ruby: Not even sure what 2 of these 3 things are, honestly. I’m an idiot.
Look at the 10 above. You could argue 9 of the 10 are purely technological, and you could argue 10 of the 10 are in essence.
Now, there are a lot of caveats here — first of all, 350 million people globally is a lot, but it’s still only about four percent of the world.
Secondly, old-school guys who have been in their jobs for a while probably aren’t in LinkedIn in a ton of industries — I think my dad only joined LinkedIn to monitor my job search. If you’re in your 50s and want to be a thought leader, sure, you should be on there. But if you’re in finance or something? You don’t need to be. When I worked at McKesson Specialty Health in Summer 2013, almost every executive there had about 200 connections and no profile pic. They didn’t even care about it.
LinkedIn is a technology company based in Silicon Valley, so of course there could be a potential bias to the types of people that sign up and have really robust profiles you can cull from.
For more on this, consider 1999 vs. 2013 in terms of where Americans are working and consider where the top jobs will supposedly be in 2022.
However you cut it, I’d say the basic argument — at least for me — is that the system we have in terms of “figuring out what the jobs are” and “getting the right people to those jobs” is somewhat broken. I’ve said that before.
