In an ever changing technology landscape, developers must continue to improve their skills and develop expertise in new fields to remain marketable.

The latest SlashData survey polled the opinions of 20,500+ developers in 167 countries to ascertain the key developer trends for 2018 and beyond.

According to SlashData’s Developer Economics survey, Data skills were among the most popular, followed by UI design and cloud development. Machine learning and data science are viewed as the most important skills they need to learn for 2019 and will be the most highly sought after in the next year.

Of those developers surveyed, 45% want to gain expertise in these fields. The report attributes this to the opportunities being created by the recent advances in deep learning, cloud computing and open source software. Design thinking is also a prominent area of expertise developers want to build skills in. Surprisingly, 10% of developers say they wanted to gain experience in marketing analytics.

The survey also shows that DevOps has entered the mainstream – at least 23% seek to develop their skills in this practice. One-eighth of developers are already working on DevOps projects.

The Leading Skills Developers Plan to Pursue in 2019:

UI design 33%

Cloud-native development 25%

Project management 24%

DevOps 23%

Data engineering 22%

Business marketing skills 18%

Python Closing the Gap on Java

Python is becoming the language of choice for developers seeking to enter the data science space. Although JavaScript remains dominant with more than ten million users, Python is on the rise with seven million active developers. More than 62% of machine learning developers and data scientists now use python. The survey says that the rise of machine learning is a “clear factor” in its popularity.

17% of developers said they wanted to learn a new programming language, 15% hardware-level coding, 12% a new web technology and 5% a new platform. The survey says that these tech skills enable developers to stay up to date within their own field of expertise.

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