What Skills do IT Companies look for in New Developers? A Study with Stack Overflow Jobs
It provides practical insights for job seekers in the IT industry by highlighting key skills to emphasize in applications, though it is incremental as it applies existing analysis methods to new data.
This study analyzed 20,000 job postings from Stack Overflow Jobs to identify the most demanded hard and soft skills in IT companies, finding that programming languages are the top hard skills and communication, collaboration, and problem-solving are the most required soft skills.
Context: There is a growing demand for information on how IT companies look for candidates to their open positions. Objective: This paper investigates which hard and soft skills are more required in IT companies by analyzing the description of 20,000 job opportunities. Method: We applied open card sorting to perform a high-level analysis on which types of hard skills are more requested. Further, we manually analyzed the most mentioned soft skills. Results: Programming languages are the most demanded hard skills. Communication, collaboration, and problem-solving are the most demanded soft skills. Conclusion: We recommend developers to organize their resumé according to the positions they are applying. We also highlight the importance of soft skills, as they appear in many job opportunities.