Today, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn released its top 5 emerging careers, where it listed “Blockchain Developer” as its biggest growing job sector for 2018.

According to LinkedIn’s 2018 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report, job listings for engineers who can develop distributed ledgers with P2P technology have grown 33 times this year. In the second place, and by quite a massive distance, is the Machine Learning Engineer role, a position which has increased 12 times within the same period.

New York needs Blockchain Developers.

The other entries in the top five jobs in 2018 are Application Sales Executive, Machine Learning Specialists, and Professional Medical Representative. The social network also found that apart from registering a staggering year-on-year growth rate, the cities with the most demand for blockchain developers’ skills are New York City, San Francisco, and Atlanta. LinkedIn also notes the major skills required for this role, which includes knowledge in Node.js, cryptocurrency, blockchain, solidity, and Ethereum.

In a blog post, Guy Berger, Chief Economist at LinkedIn, explained why demand went up for developers who understood the distributed ledger technology.

“It’s no surprise that we’re seeing an explosion of machine learning roles and continuing growth of data science roles. In fact, we started to see glimmers of this in last year’s report; however, both fields are starting to see more specialized roles emerge. It also may not shock you that Blockchain Developer is topping the list following this year’s surge in interest around blockchain and cryptocurrency.”

Blockchain has come a long way since Bitcoin, and its counterparts emerged from the dark web to capture the attention of global masses and the financial industry. It’s not surprising why “What is Bitcoin?” has been one of the most commonly asked questions this year on Google.

Blockchain Courses

With more universities adopting blockchain-related courses and the demand for blockchain expertise continuing to increase, there is no doubt that the profession emerges as the most requested one this year.

However, while blockchain developer is the most emerged job this year on LinkedIn, on Indeed.com, the opposite is the case. It is worthy to note that job offerings for blockchain-related jobs have been on the decline this year as a direct consequence of the bear market, as per a CCN.com report. Research has shown that while blockchain remains one of the better-paying tech sectors to delve into, the demand for these engineers and specialists has declined.

CCN.com quoted an Indeed representative who said the interest for roles related to blockchain and bitcoin had dropped by 3.06%, “while employer interest for roles related to the same terms only rose 25.49%. Which was very different than the interest levels from the year before by both parties.”

Featured image from Shutterstock.