Boston Market | September 2011

As President Obama addresses the nation about job creation in America, workers with in-demand skills are fairing better than others.

Notably, residents of Massachusetts are experiencing a 7.6 percent unemployment rate, considerably better than the national average rate of 9.1 percent. And residents of Massachusetts with the right mix of technology skills and experience have more options than most.

Developers In Demand

WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, ran a Labor Day story entitled In Tough Labor Market, Software Developers Wanted. The story featured Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of Cambridge-based HubSpot. Not only is he having a challenge finding talent, he is willing to give you $10,000 just for helping him find the right developers to join his team.

Boston Job Market for September

So, what are the Web-related technology skills that are most in-demand in the Boston metro area? The list of Top 20 Web Technologies in Boston has been updated and appears in the right-hand column. Each technology links to job postings at Boston.com that list that technology keyword in the job description.

The number of job postings for most technologies has increased since early June despite the uncertainty surrounding our elected leaders' inability to form a consensus around the best way to steer our economic ship.

Technology Training Opportunity

One challenge that faces many job seekers is "How can I learn the skills I need to qualify for one of these jobs?" Boston PHP has a solution. Boston PHP is the largest Web technology Meetup in New England with more than 2,000 members.

Boston PHP offers two virtual self-study groups targeting Web technology beginners.

~ PHP Percolate! for beginners who want to learn the basics of PHP and MySQL

~ jQuery jAM for beginners who want the learn the basics of JavaScript and jQuery

Why these technologies? Simply because employers are looking for workers who have these skills:

#4 JavaScript | 372 job postings
#12 PHP | 177 job postings
#14 MySQL | 165 job postings
#20 jQuery | 132 job postings

If you would like to participate in one of the Boston PHP self-study groups, simply become a member of Boston PHP and state your interest in joining either PHP Percolate! or jQuery jAM when you sign up. Membership is free.

Full Disclosure: PHP Percolate! and jQuery jAM are lead by the author of this blog article.

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