You're smart, you love to code. But are your skills sync-ed with what employers want? Are you sure that, if your job becomes unstable, you can find a new one? Maybe you learned FoxPro 20 years ago and, no surprise, no one is hiring FoxPro experts any more. Does your resume use the right buzzwords to reflect your hard-earned knowledge? HR departments sometimes use bots to scan resumes and make mistakes. And what about learning a rare skill that gives you high pay! You achieve these goals by carefully analyzing the coding skills in demand now. After reading this article, you'll be prepared to analyze the skills market and be smart about how you learn new skills!
Quick story... Years ago, I was a mainframe programmer, and I could tell that my mainframe skills were rapidly becoming unmarketable, and I was pretty underpaid to boot. My employers didn't really treat me very well, and I didn't have a lot of options with my current skill set.
Having read "What Color is Your Parachute", I took matters onto my own hands: I took classes in VB, Java and C++. Then I begged to write my next work project in any of them. The let me write my project in VB and boom! Now I had the skill and the experience. Shortly after finishing that project, I was able to switch jobs and double my salary, on the strength of my new skill! The operating principle is: 1) Don't leave your career to chance, take charge! 2) Pick skills that are worth something in the market 3) Do whatever it takes to legitimately get that skill on your resume as work experience, and benefit from the results.
Years later, I'm still doing fine, but because I always want to have the best skills on my resume, I wrote a program to scrape the web and actually measure what the employers are looking for. Then I looked at the results and realized that I haven't made the best choices about picking new technologies to learn. For fun, I thought I'd share what I learned with you.