Whether scrolling through social media posts by small business owners in one’s network, chatting with friends and family involved in the hiring process, or just listening to or reading business news, it’s all too common these days to encounter the challenges businesses large and small are having finding staff. Many employers are lamenting the difficulty in finding anyone to fill an open position, let alone someone with the experience and skills they’re looking for.
The Challenges of Staffing Today
For employers, the reality of the labor market today is an obvious challenge. However, for those looking for a career change or their first career-focused job, the situation represents an opportunity to land a dream job. It’s important for these employees to understand the skills that are in top demand. Employers can leverage this information as well. One way to gain insight into what skills employers are on the hunt for is to find out what employees are spending their time learning.
Employee Learning Preferences
New data from Udemy’s corporate product, Udemy Business, identifies the top “surging” skills in the workplace in June 2021. Here we take a look at the top surging tech skills, which Udemy defines as the skills seeing the most activity on Udemy Business.
Top 10 Surging Tech Skills
- Helm
- Cisco Unified Communications
- Informatica Power Center
- HR Analytics
- Pentaho
- Eclipse IDE
- Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant
- Tally ERP
- Oracle Developer
- Check Point Security
Many of the skills Udemy learners are focused on are highly specialized and focused on specific software applications. Helm is a great example.
A Focus on Software Applications
Udemy Business students studying Helm increased by more than 1,200% in June! Helm is a very specific application used for managing Kubernetes, which is itself “an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.”
Without insight into what corporate learners are studying, one might have little to no awareness of Helm or Kubernetes at all. But armed with that knowledge, both job seekers and employers can leverage these insights to compete effectively in a challenging employment market.
Keep in mind as well that the technical or “hard skills” companies and corporate learners are focused on are important. But hard skills are just one part of the equation. In a follow-up post, we’ll look at the soft skills corporate learners are most focused on.