Engineering’s new world of work: A look at today’s most in-demand skills

Has there ever been a more exciting time to be an engineer? The world is in the midst of a massive technological transformation, and as engineers we get to be at the center of it all: helping organizations navigate a new wave of change brought on by advancements in AI. I love seeing engineers embrace our roles as thought leaders in this movement all around the world. Notably, LinkedIn’s Future of Work report notes that engineers rank second behind only executives in driving global conversations about AI.

But this new technology isn’t just changing the types of products or features we can build – it’s transforming the entire complexion of the engineering landscape - resulting in the emergence of new skills, jobs, and entirely new ways of working within organizations.

So, as engineers, what exactly are the most important skills for us to focus on developing in order to set ourselves up for success and deliver more impact for our organizations???

With Engineers Week underway, we set out to answer that question by analyzing our Most In-Demand* Skills for Engineers across the U.S., U.K. and India from our LinkedIn Economic Graph - a digital representation of all the relationships across our platform. I’m excited to share the insights below.

Employers signal soft skills aren’t just nice to have; they’re highly sought after

In a time where everyone in an organization is looking to deploy AI-powered products and services to amplify their impact (and do so as soon as possible), engineers are in high-demand by stakeholders in every function. Having strong “soft-skills” – such as being an effective communicator – can be a force-multiplier in the amount of impact an engineer can have, and employers are taking note.

Our analysis shows that Communication is the single most sought-after soft skill for engineers in the U.S. today, followed by Analytical Skills and Leadership. What’s further is that this result holds true around the world - we observed similar findings in all three major engineering markets: the U.S., India, and the U.K.

In fact, the growing emphasis on soft skills is part of a consistent trend we’ve seen in other research we’ve conducted as well: tech professionals with a combination of soft skills and hard skills get promoted more than 13% faster than employees with only hard skills.?

Hard skills aren’t going anywhere

The growing importance of strengthening our soft-skills doesn’t mean that as engineers we can just give up on honing our technical skills, however. Hard skills are of course still needed to integrate, adapt, and customize all of these new AI capabilities for our organizations. In particular, skills in key programming languages commonly used in the development of AI – Python, Java, and SQL – rank among the top five most sought-after skills on the technical side in the U.S.

Adapting to change

We all know that the one constant in our industry is change; technology is always evolving and developing new skills is an essential part of being a successful engineer.

That’s why I’m thrilled to share that as of today we will be providing free access on LinkedIn Learning? to more than 40 courses that cover the most in-demand hard and soft skills for engineers, for the next 30 days. These courses have been hand-picked to align with the insight I’ve shared here and have material that spans both of the “most in-demand skills” lists. I hope you find these courses valuable and take full advantage of them to grow and succeed in this new era!

Methodology Citations *In-Demand Skills are defined as skills that are most sought after by employers, hirers and job-posters in a given period. To determine the demand for a given skill, LinkedIn considers what skills employers have hired for in recent months as well as the skills they look for when recruiting/posting jobs. Data was analyzed across three top engineering markets – India, the U.K. and the U.S. – between May and Oct 2023.