For our recent Thinkopolis report on the most sought-after skills by Canadian employers, the team here analyzed millions of job postings. You can read the full report here. One of the trends we noticed over the past year was a rapid increase in software and tech skills being requested in job ads.
This is true for opportunities across sectors, and not just in technology and digital media roles. Keeping up with the trends and technologies of how people communicate and share information is also essential for career success. Once upon a time, reading and writing were considered the basic skills for most jobs. Digital literacy has become the new literacy.
We can see a high level of demand for digital literacy and computer skills in Canadian job postings right now. This is particularly true in the areas of document production, filing and sharing. Among the top skills sought after in job postings are the following collection:
- Microsoft Office, Excel, Word, PowerPoint
- Microsoft Works
- Reports
- Documentation
- Computer use
Digital literacy is evolving to include more advanced computer skills as well, as among the hottest of the up-and-coming skill requirements appearing in job postings are coding and social media savvy.
Social media skills are becoming essential for an increasingly wide range of roles beyond community managers, including Human Resources, Sales, Designers and Developers, and of course Marketing.
Other hot tech skills for rapidly rising demand:
- HTML5
- Social media platforms
- Big data
- nosql
- jQuery
- Tableau
- MongoDB
- Google Analytics
- JSON
- Revit
Specifically for jobs in the technology and digital media field, these are the ten most requested skills in current job descriptions.
- SQL
- Java
- Shell scripting
- Oracle
- JavaScript
- Agile
- Operating systems
- HTML / CSS
- Extensible markup language (XML)
- Linux
Acquiring some of the most sought-after tech skills can greatly increase the number of jobs you qualify for. But remember that while these credentials are important, employers across the board also say they’re looking for signs of soft skills— abilities that are more interpersonal than technical—for the stand-out candidates they need to hire. “Communications” is the single most sought-after skill in Canadian job postings.