Top 10 Programming Skills That Will Get You Hired

As a developer you know that working in the same code day-in-and-day-out can get a little stale, to say the least. Adding new programming skills to your IT toolbox is essential in the struggle to stay relevant in the fast-paced tech world, but knowing which technology to choose isn’t always obvious. Your time is limited and with the multitude of languages and environments picking the wrong area to focus your efforts can prove costly.

Indeed.com, a job aggregation website, shared recent stats with CIO.com to help identify where the jobs and the money are. Using recent job listings, we’ve identified the programming languages that are in demand by employers as well as the top cities for particular programming languages and which top-tier companies are hiring.

Most businesses and websites have databases that work behind the scenes and many of those databases rely on SQL. Structured Query Language is what is referred to as a specialized programming language in that it was designed for editing and querying data residing in relational database management systems.

Java’s write once-and-run-anywhere mantra says it all. This cross-platform, object-oriented programming language has become one of the most sought-after programming skills in the developer world. It’s been around since 1995 and is still one of the most popular languages from a developer and an employer perspective.

Tiobe Programming Community Index

HTML is one of the fundamental technologies that the Web is built upon. When combined with JavaScript and CSS, you can use HTML to create impressive Web pages and apps with interactive features such as geolocation capabilities, better forms, video and canvas capabilities and Web storage. Add CSS and jQuery to the mix and you’ve got one of the hottest design paradigms right now: responsive design. These features will help developers and businesses better engage with their customers.

JavaScript, like HTML is a part of the fabric of the Web. It’s been around forever, but it has recently shown resurgence with the jQuery libraries. It’s used in pretty much every Web browser to make Web pages more interactive among other things.

Tiobe Programming Community Index

C++, developed by Bjarne Strousup in 1983, is an enhancement of the programming language C. The addition of object-oriented programming has given this high-level language some low-level capabilities making it a good multi-purpose language capable of building stand-alone applications as well as reusable code.

Tiobe Programming Community Index

Object-oriented C# (pronounced C Sharp) was developed by Microsoft as a multi-paradigm programming language that is fully compatible with Microsoft’s .NET schema. Although it’s used mainly on Windows, C# is designed as a cross-platform language.

Tiobe Programming Community Index

Extensible Markup Language, or XML, is a markup language used to define document encoding that has gone on to become the default for many office productivity suites. Where HTML is about how information is displayed, XML is about transporting and storing data. The format is such that the code is readable by both humans and machines.

C is arguably the most widely used and currently the most popular programming language, according to the Tiobe Programming Community Index. A host of other programming languages have borrowed from this general purpose language including, C#, Python, Java PHP and Perl.

Tiobe Programming Community Index

Larry Wall created Perl in 1987; it originally got its start as a general purpose Unix scripting language. It has a hodge-podge of features from C, shell script, AWK and sed that is designed to allow developers to work more easily with text data.

Python is high-level object-oriented programming language that developers can use in many ways. Python is all about readability. It’s uniform and streamlined syntax allows programmers to build concepts more quickly and with less code.

Rounding out the Top 15

Top Ten Cities Ranked for the Top Ten Skills