Analysis of Technical Skills in Job Advertisements Targeted at Software Developers

Abstract

The present paper has two parts. The first part is a trend analysis from the period 1990-2004 and the second part is a cross-sectional analysis from the year 2004. In both parts, the purpose was to find the most common technical skills sought in American job advertisements for software developer positions. Unlike in previous researches, also distributed technology skills were analyzed thoroughly because as a consequence of World Wide Web technology, these skills are required now more often than ten years ago. According to the trend analysis, the mean of the number of required technical skills increased from 3.6 to 7.7, and the technical requirements have changed as more versatile. The proportion of distributed technology skills increased very strongly: from 0% in 1990 to 65.1% in 2004. According to the cross-sectional analysis, the top five skills sought in 2004 were Windows, Java, C++, SQL, and Unix. In addition, implications to computer science education are considered.

Understanding what industry wants from requirements engineers

“…Our data collection approach was inspired by the methodological recommendations of scholars in those fields. Specifically, we drew on Gallivan et al [13] and Surakka [14]. As per [13,14], a data collection strategy based on job ads fits well in situations when (i) a researcher needs to balance the cost for executing the study against breadth and depth of the study and (ii) qualitative data is publically available for analysis.…”

IS curriculum career tracks: a UK study

“…In these cases programme specification documents and course handbooks were obtained either online or by contacting academic colleagues via e‐mail to request the relevant information. The subsequent data codification and analysis was based on similar studies in the past which involved cataloguing and analysing data according to different criteria such as the content of online job ads (Park et al , 2009; Surakka, 2005; Gallivan et al , 2004) or IS degree course surveys (Kung et al , 2006; Lifer et al , 2009).…”

Content Analysis of Job Advertisements for Identifying Employability Skills

“…They also suggest that these kinds of studies are needed all the time to reflect the current state of the labour market. The results of the previously mentioned research by Surakka [7] indicate that if the number of required skills for computer science graduates continues to increase, degree programs might have severe difficulties in following this change. In addition, Krstić [19] performed research on big data analysis to bring valuable business insights in the financial industry, indicating that methods can be used for any other domain to extract information.…”

“…Their approach included extracting key terms from over 80 000 job advertisements. The Dice platform was also used in research by Surakka [7] with similar motivation for research as Smith and Ali [6], reporting that the duties of software developers changed as technically more versatile, that it is no longer enough to have skills only in one or two programming languages. Molinero and Xie [8] presented key groups of skills in online job advertisements using cluster analysis in combination with multi-dimensional scaling.…”