To give aspiring developers an idea of what software languages to focus on to start a career, Tunga created the TOP 20 most in-demand software skills.
Dutch tech company Tunga is an expert in high quality software products and on a mission to create attractive IT-jobs for African youths. Working with a network of over 400 software developers in countries like Egypt, Nigeria and Uganda, it has excellent insight in what software skills will be most in demand. To give aspiring developers an idea of what software languages to focus on to start a career, Tunga created the TOP 20 of most in demand software skills. It was made following an extensive market research into what businesses are currently looking for and what they are willing to pay.
The TOP 20 for 2021
- 1. Perl
- 2. Ruby
- 3. C++
- 4. Python
- 5. SQL
- 6. C#
- 7. Java
- 8. Javascript
- 9. C
- 10. Bash/Shell/Powershell
- 11. Scala
- 12. PHP
- 13. TypeScript
- 14. HTML/CSS
- 15. VBA
- 16. Swift
- 17. R
- 18. Objective-C
- 19. Go
- 20. Kotlin
Good impression
Ernesto Spruyt, CEO of Tunga: "As Tunga, we like to unleash talent and a good starting point for aspiring developers, is to know what to focus on. For our TOP 20, we made an equally-weighted ranking based on the number of outstanding job postings, salary level and salary momentum. These three aspects together should give a good impression of what software skills are the most in demand in the coming year."
"Both Perl and Ruby are languages that are generally considered doomed, but the pressure is still high. It is possible that the negative press they got, made it unattractive for developers to take them up as new skills, creating a relative scarcity in the process. So even though in the long run they might not be the most popular languages, they are now!"
Vacancies, salaries, demand
First Tunga looked at times languages appeared in job vacancies, which ranged from around 2,500 postings with Golang to 84,000 for Python. SQL came just behind Python. The next step was to look at what companies were willing to pay a developer. Hiring a Scala, Go or Perl developer is most expensive. Demand for Perl, VBA and C++ developers has most momentum — they are becoming more difficult to source and therefore more expensive.
About the research
Most available data concern the US, but because many tech trends are initiated there it was assumed they are a good representation of what happens globally. The research was based on data from StackOverflow, Dice and Indeed.com. Data was gathered on twenty software languages filtered out of the StackOverflow survey based on perceived popularity and available data.
