Which Skills Do You Need for LinkedIn's Emerging Job List? An Analysis.

LinkedIn recently published its ‘2020 Emerging Jobs’ reports for various countries. These reports are interesting for companies as they give a sense of the careers that are developing in their region and the new skill sets that potential employees are developing. They are also great for employees to track the new skills that employers are increasingly looking for.

As interesting as the reports are, I didn’t find the presentation format very useful. They were helping for knowing the names of the emerging jobs, but a job is made up of skills. A particular job can have different names, but the skills required should be fairly consistent across companies and countries. The skills are also the ‘pathway’ to that career. I.e If you develop the skills you may become eligible for the job.

Question: which skills are most important in terms of opening the door to multiple emerging careers?

Some caveats:

Linkedin is perfectly placed for this type of data, due to the number of users providing detailed information on their changing jobs; however, their data is limited to the type of jobs that people post on Linkedin. There are plenty of industries that don’t really engage with the platform.

Next, these are ‘emerging jobs’, and may still be small. There are lots of jobs out there for Java programmers, doctors, accountants, etc but these are not new and so doesn’t appear on the list. So, remember that these are growing, not widely established roles.

Jobs by Country

To get some range in the data, I looked at the reports for Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, US.

Each country had 15 jobs, so a total of 75 emerging jobs were listed. Of these, 37 are unique values. Twenty-two jobs were listed in only one country, and the other 15 appeared in 2 or more countries. Four jobs appear on the list of all 5 countries.

This reinforces why I wanted to focus on skills rather than jobs. Many of the jobs that appear in one country are very similar to others. “Customer Experience Designer” and “Service Designer” have basically identical skillsets. As do “Data Consultant” and “Big Data Developer”. So let’s look at skills instead of job titles.

If you are curious, the four jobs that appear in every country’s list are: Artificial Intelligence Specialist, Customer Success Specialist, Cybersecurity Specialist, Full Stack Engineer.

Skills in Each Country

Skills: in total, 392 skills were listed, of which there are 144 unique skills. The same skill can be required in multiple jobs in one country or in different countries.

There is still some level of overlap, from very similar skills having slightly different names (e.g. ‘Agile Methodologies’, ‘Agile Product Management’, ‘Agile Project Management’). For now, I’ll keep the count based on the exact skills listed in the documents. Maybe employers view these as different.

Looking at the distribution of the skills, 81 appear in only 1 country, and the other 63 are in multiple. Seventeen skills are in the lists of all 5 countries.

Types of Skills in Each Country

I grouped the skills into rough categories to visualise the requirements in each country: technical, marketing, management, design, medical, finance.

• Technical and marketing skills dominate the emerging jobs in all countries. India has nothing else 
• Most countries have some management skills as well.
• Singapore and US have medical jobs,
• Australia and Canada have design jobs
• Australia has a finance job

Technical Skills

Since technical skills make up most of the list for each country, lets deep dive in there. I’ve roughly sub-categorised them. Specific programming languages are highly in demand. Outside of that, there are a couple of buckets of skill areas:

• AI / ML / Data Science
• Big Data – mostly to do with management and databases
• Automation / RPA / Robotics
• DevOps / Site Reliability Engineering

Programming Languages

Since programming languages are the largest set of emerging skills overall, Here are the programming languages specified for the different jobs.

As we can see, Python comes out well ahead. It’s a versatile language that aligns with most of the modern AI and data science activities. It even appears in robotics jobs.

After Python comes various types of Javascript. I’m going to group them all together here.

Now who is king? Most of the Javascript related jobs actually look for people who have multiple JS skills sets, such as React + Angular + Node + MongoDB, so it is worth seeing these as skill sets that should be developed together.

In fact, a ‘Full Stack Engineer” with these skills is an emerging job in all 5 countries!

Technical Skills – Big Data

These skills relate to the management and analysis of huge data stores. Nothing really surprising here.

Technical Skills – Cloud / DevOps / SRE

With more and more computing and storage moving to the cloud, someone has to set it up and keep it running. There are a few emerging jobs mixed together here based on overlapping skills: Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer. A little surprising is the limited Azure mention – could be something to do with emerging jobs at startups which can be more AWS focused compared to enterprises.

LinkedIn noted in a blog post that most of these DevOps/SRE skills above didn’t exist in their trend reports from 2015, so these are fields with constantly changing tools and skills.

Technical Skills – AI/ML

These are pretty generic skills, suggesting that recruiters have other, non-skill, criteria for hiring. Possibility domain expertise, duration of experience, or subsets of these skills.

Technical Skills – Robotics / RPA

Personally I find it confusing when RPA and real robotics get mixed together, given how different the skill sets are. But everyone wants to be in automation and robots, whether or not the robots are real.

RPA skills are heavily software-based. Fanuc is the only physical robot manufacturer mentioned.

Technical Skills – Cybersecurity

Seems strange to call cybersecurity an ‘emerging job’, but given the endless stream of hacks and data breaches, and the new complexity of cloud computing, there is clearly still growing demand for these skills.

All generic skills really. Interesting that there are no industry-standard tools or software listed.

Marketing Skills

Unlike the technical jobs which are quite consistent in the skills required, marketing jobs have far more skill variation.

While Python is Python in all countries, digital marketing jobs might ask for ‘Google Ads’, or “Search Engine Marketing”, or just “Digital Marketing’. Of the 38 skills in the marketing jobs, 23 appear only once due to this variety in naming.

To simplify this, there are a couple of skill buckets we can look at:

• Digital Marketing – SEM, SEO, Social Media etc. This can also be specialised in areas such as commerce or marketing automation.
• CRM / Marketing Software – lots of requirement for marketing teams who can effectively use CRM tools, most commonly Salesforce, as well as related tools like Marketo. CRM can refer both to the software, as well as using the software effectively to manage the customer relationship.
• Customer Success – we used to have sales and account management departments that tried to sell you more stuff, and customer service departments, where the service people helped with support and complaints. With the shift to SaaS, there is a growing role in customer success. This means ensuring that customers are using the software as well as possible and integrating it deeper into their business processes. It is also about analysing churn to understand how to better retain future customers. This also applies to DTC brands and e-commerce – how do you use data to build long-term relationships with customers?

Management Skills - Product Owner

There are two CXO level roles on the list:

• Chief Revenue Officer (US) – in many cases this would have previously been called a CMO. Many companies (both startups and enterprises) are using the CRO designation to put focus on the sales results.
• Chief Strategy Officer (Australia) – I see this as building a management consulting practice in-house, and is particularly useful for companies expanding into new markets.

I’ll focus here on the wider emerging management job, which is a Product Owner and is in demand in 4 of the 5 countries.

As in the marketing emerging jobs list, there is a focus here on software, particularly SaaS.

In addition to these, domain expertise will always be required. The product owner needs to have a clear understanding of customer requirements and the business impact of the product.

Design Skills - UX/UI

The 2 emerging design jobs are both in user experience design. Skills have similar names – ‘customer experience design’, ‘user experience design’, ‘user-centered design’ etc. The jobs don’t specify particular software requirements.

Finance and Medical Jobs

These are the last two categories. As they are quite niche roles, I’m not going into detail.

Australia is hiring Anti-Money Laundering Specialists. The US is hiring Behavioural Health Technicians and Singapore is looking for Clinical Specialists. See the original reports if you want more details.

Emerging Jobs – Skill Buckets

I’m going to put together some ‘buckets’ of skills. These are sector-related and can be applied to multiple jobs in that field. These are also in demand across multiple of the countries that I considered.

These are in no particular order:

Data Science

• Python, Machine Learning, Tensorflow, Pytorch, Deep Learning, NLP

Big Data

• Apache Spark, Hadoop, Hive, ETL, Data Engineering

JavaScript – Full Stack Development

• JavaScript, AngularJS, Node.js, React.js, MongoDB, HTML, CSS

Robotic Process Automation

• Uipath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, Selenium

DevOps / SRE

• AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible

Cybersecurity

• Skills: Information Security, Network Security, Penetration Testing, Vulnerability Assessment

User Experience

• UX Design, UI Design, Design Thinking

Product Management

• Agile / Scrum, Jira, Product Management

Digital Marketing

• Digital Marketing, CRM tools, Marketing Automation, Salesforce, Customer Success + Lifecycle + Retention

How to use these buckets?

The best use of this data is to highlight complementary skills that can increase access to jobs.

For example, if you are a product manager in a company that is not using Agile methodology, then learning that can open doors for you, as will learning Jira.

If you are a UX or UI designer, then learning Design Thinking could be the way to go.

A front-end JS developer can explore adding backend JS, or new frameworks to their skill set.

If you are not a programmer and want to try learning a language, then Python is probably the way to go. It is an easier language in terms of syntax and is in demand across multiple job roles.

If you are at the beginning of your career, then it is essential to understand how important data skills will be to almost any profession. Data journalism is growing quickly, as are data roles in social science. Law and order and medicine are both seeing the implementation of data science and AI applications.

The End

I hope this was useful. If you spot any errors or have questions, please let me know.

Edit (from questions I received): How did this post happen, since I don’t really work in hiring or skill development? I got a copy of the India report and wanted to compare it to some other countries, just out of curiosity. Looking at a few other reports, I noticed that similar jobs and skills were using slightly different names, and wondered if there were some common threads. The reports were all in different formats, many being PDFs with text as images and so not searchable which annoyed me. I OCRd the docs and scraped the text to CSV files for analysis.