JavaScript is the most in-demand IT skill

Report based on hiring trends cites JavaScript, SQL, and Java skills as the most sought after in the past year

Editor at Large, InfoWorld |

JavaScript is the most in-demand IT skill — Dean Mitchell / Getty Images

JavaScript is the skill that is most in-demand for IT in 2020, according to a report from developer skills tester DevSkiller.

The report, “Top IT Skills report 2020: Demand and Hiring Trends,” has JavaScript switching places with Java when compared to last year’s report, with Java in third place this year, behind SQL. SQL is the second most in-demand IT skill for the second year in a row.

The surging popularity of JavaScript shows that the overwhelming need for developers to build web apps has eclipsed the need for developing large back-end systems, the report said.

The top five most in-demand skills in the 2020 report were:

JavaScript
SQL
Java
HTML/CSS
.NET/C#

The report was published January 8, 2020, and updates were added on January 20. Data in the study came from a snapshot of users on the company’s platform beginning December 1, 2018, and ending exactly one year later. The results are based on 213,782 tests taken on the DevSkiller platform by candidates in 143 countries.

Other observations noted in the report:

72 percent of companies are looking for JavaScript developers, followed by 55 percent for SQL developers and 53 percent for Java developers.
React, Spring, ASP.NET, MySQL, and HTML are the most popular technologies in the JavaScript, Java, .NET/C#, SQL, and CSS “stacks,” respectively.
For the Python stack, data analysis was the most-common IT skill, followed by Django and NumPy.
Latvian developers score the highest on coding tests.
U.S. recruits make up 24.73 percent of all overseas developer candidates, followed by Poland at 11.77 percent.

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Paul Krill is an editor at large at InfoWorld, whose coverage focuses on application development.