These 20 technology skills can help you beat IT job market blues – Economic Times

You can beat the gathering gloom in job market by equipping yourself with the latest tech skills. In a bleak employment scenario, evolving technology has opened up a vast space as businesses chase innovative solutions.

The new-age skill sets such as natural language processing are in high demand and promise market-beating rates.

Data from a website that matches freelancers with employers reveals US demand for software engineers who program computers to understand human speech grew faster than workers with any other skill. Voice-activated virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Echo devices have been made possible by natural language processing.

According to a Bloomberg report on the Upwork data, freelancers who know natural language processing earned an average hourly rate of $123 per hour, and the total amount that they billed increased by 2,300 per cent last quarter from a year earlier. "The nascent boom in these jobs also foreshadows the employment that advances in artificial intelligence could create, even while they replace other human tasks," says the Bloomberg report.

While natural language processing topped Upwork's list of the 20 fastest-growing skills, Swift, a programming language used to build apps for Apple devices, ranked second, followed by Tableau, a system to create data visualisations.

Amazon Marketplace Web Services, Stripe, Instagram marketing, MySQL programming, Unbounce, social media management and Angular JS were other top skills in the Upwork list.

Evolving technology works both way-if it creates demand for new skills, it also renders even some recent tech skills obsolete. "The demand for workers who know how to analyze Twitter data plunged 51% last quarter from a year earlier, reflecting the social media service's struggle to grow its user base," says the Bloomberg report.

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These 20 technology skills can help you beat IT job market blues - Economic Times