Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Boston Market | August 2010

Are you stuck in the middle?

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, being a middle-skilled worker seeking middle-skilled wages may not be an attractive place to hang your shingle.

Longer-term trends are at play. For one, the U.S. education system hasn't been producing enough people with the highly specialized skills that many companies, particularly in manufacturing, require to keep driving productivity gains. "There are a lot of people who are unemployed, but those aren't necessarily the people employers are looking for," says David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For details access "Some Firms Struggle to Hire Despite High Unemployment"

While the article focuses on technology skills in manufacturing, a similar case might be argued for "middle-skilled" Web technology workers.

Top 20 Web Technologies in Boston

The list of Top 20 Web Technologies in Boston has been updated for August and appears in the right-hand column. "Middle-skilled" Web technologies might be defined as those Web skills that fall short of the Top 20 list.

It's not that these skills are not in demand, it's simply that other skills are mentioned more frequently in job descriptions, and thus appear to be in greater demand by employers.

The current threshold to make the Top 20 hovers around 100 job postings that mention a particular skill. Here are a few technologies that fall just short of this Top-20 threshold:

High Skill + High Demand

Whatever collection of Web technology skills you currently possess it is in your best interest to develop a high degree of competence and confidence in your skill-set. If you feel you are "stuck in the middle" then perhaps an upgrade is in order.

The top seven technologies are mentioned at least 200 times in job descriptions. Perhaps an upgrade to a skill that is in greater demand might be in order:

  • 1. SQL | 735 job postings
  • 2. Oracle | 615 job postings
  • 3. Java | 450 job postings
  • 4. XML | 286 job postings
  • 5. SQL Server | 285 job postings
  • 6. JavaScript | 263 job postings
  • 7. C# | 235 job postings

Needless-to-say, programming skills and database expertise never seem to go out of style. Demonstrating a "high-skill" level in a high-demand technology might be the road not taken to avoid becoming "stuck in the middle."

For additional information, check out a previous blog article:

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