Every time you turn around, you’re hearing about data science, DevOps, mobile-first, growth hackers, etc. But that doesn’t mean the existing footprint has disappeared — far from it, in fact. Recruiters continue to search in huge numbers to hire enterprise talent, not just for the latest generation of tech unicorns.
This week, LinkedIn released its annual report on the top skills recruiters search for. Prominent on the top 25 were enterprise stalwarts like:
- Middleware and Integration Software
- Storage Systems and Management
- Business Intelligence
- Java Development
- SAP ERP Systems
Since recruiter interest links directly to the hiring market, it’s clear that companies continue to search for talent that you could expect to be ubiquitous at this point. This supports the more general assertion that developers as a whole are in shortage.
Consequently, I would argue that the tech industry needs to focus on training of existing tech-savvy folks who aren’t yet developers. I’ve run across quite a bit of anecdata about Salesforce admins who start as administrative assistants and become developers. More recently at Splunk .conf, I came across a Splunk admin who followed the same path by transitioning into a manager of a dev team.
Democratizing development is one thing, but equally important is remembering that it’s a funnel that enables you to bring some of those proto-developers farther down the road. You can’t wait around for the “pipeline” to fix itself starting in grade school.
Disclosure: Oracle (which owns the Java trademark), Salesforce.com, SAP, and Splunk are clients. LinkedIn is not.
