Which skills are most sought-after in Silicon Valley?

Everybody knows Silicon Valley. The region is a synonym for ideas and innovation and is the hotspot for the world’s best experts. World-famous technology companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, eBay, Cisco, Electronic Arts, Symantec, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Maxtor, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Intel, Foursys and many more are based there. But also universities such as Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. 

Education, future prospects, success, high living standards and an income above average are attracting the international highly educated youth. But which skills are most in demand  in Silicon Valley?

The company HiringSolved used its artificial intelligence software, RAI, to scan millions of public profiles to identify the skills of the people who were recently hired by big technology companies in the Valley. This study provides a look into what characteristics are the most valuable on this job market, which type of employee these companies are looking for and which universities most of the candidates attended. 

The study analyzed the profiles of more than 10,000 people who have been hired or promoted by the top 25 Silicon Valley companies since 2016. To collect all this data, they developed an algorithm that particularly indexed the skills and positions of the successful candidates. Thanks to this process, it was possible to analyze in real time the ideal profiles sought-after by technology companies. The most important parameters for the analysis were the skills and competencies the candidates described when they were hired, and the positions they held

This is a list of the most sought-after skills:

1. Python - High-level programming language, it’s said to be a mainstay for backend web application development.
2. Java - Also a high-level programming language. It’s one of the most used languages in e-commerce and business applications as well as the foundation of Android applications.
3. Cloud Services - Cloud computing refers to apps and services offered via the internet. Those services are provided by data centers all over the world, also known as “clouds”. This technology allows us to maintain all available resources on virtual platforms in real time.
4. Linux - The preferred operating system for engineers and programmers, Linux is the backend of most of the top 100 websites.
5. JavaScript - Although it has many of the features and structures of the Java language, JavaScript is a programming language which was developed independently by Netscape. It can interact with HTML code so that developers can use dynamic content. 
6. SQL - The standard language for storing and retrieving data in an application. It’s used to access and change information in database systems that most apps are built on.
7. Matlab - Used heavily in applied mathematics, science and engineering.
8. HTML - Just as JavaScript, this programming language is used to build websites and make them more interactive. All websites and many apps use HTML. This knowledge is necessary for doing almost anything that touches the web. 
9. Perl - A free, platform independent and interpreted programming language (script language) supporting several programming paradigms. It’s special strengths are high performance and efficiency in processing text-like data.
10. Go - A relatively new language created by Google. With Go, several processes can be executed at the same time. 

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Thank you for reading this!

Wilgen and the alugha team!