Highest-leverage developer skills to learn
If you only have time to learn a few things, learn these. Each skill below is scored on three things at once: how often employers ask for it, what it pays over a typical developer role, and how often people actually pass it when they practise. The skills that are in demand, pay well, and trip people up are the ones worth your study time. They sit at the top.
| Skill | Market demand | Median pay | Pass rate | Leverage | Practice |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JavaScript | 20% of postings | US$160,000+20% | 45% | 46 | Practice |
| Python | 60% of postings | US$170,000+28% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Databases & SQL | 55% of postings | US$167,031+26% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| AWS | 51% of postings | US$171,000+28% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| System Design | 32% of postings | US$183,021+38% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| HTTP & APIs | 30% of postings | US$166,000+25% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| AI Engineering | 27% of postings | US$182,500+37% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Docker | 23% of postings | £80,000+10% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| CI-CD Pipelines | 23% of postings | £78,625+8% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Kubernetes | 19% of postings | US$175,500+32% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| React | 16% of postings | US$175,000+31% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| DevOps | 15% of postings | £82,500+14% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| TypeScript | 14% of postings | US$177,500+33% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Terraform | 12% of postings | US$175,000+31% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Java | 8% of postings | £78,500+8% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| dbt | 7% of postings | £80,000+10% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Node.js | 7% of postings | US$176,800+33% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Snowflake | 7% of postings | £80,000+10% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| CSS | 6% of postings | US$170,000+28% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Apache Airflow | 5% of postings | US$156,000+17% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Go | 5% of postings | US$180,000+35% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Google Cloud Platform | 4% of postings | £95,000+31% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Microsoft Azure | 4% of postings | £75,000+3% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Web Platform | 3% of postings | US$167,950+26% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Machine Learning | 3% of postings | US$147,925+11% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Apache Spark | 2% of postings | £75,000+3% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Git | 2% of postings | £70,000−3% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| React Native | 1% of postings | US$173,000+30% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| C++ | 1% of postings | £70,000−3% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Behavioral | 1% of postings | £90,000+24% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Databricks | 1% of postings | £68,750−5% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Threat Modeling | 1% of postings | £72,000−1% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Vulnerability Management | 1% of postings | £68,750−5% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Rust | 1% of postings | US$160,000+20% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| SIEM & SOAR | 1% of postings | £65,000−10% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| SAST & DAST Tooling | 1% of postings | £75,000+3% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| MLOps | 1% of postings | US$190,000+43% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Apache Kafka | 1% of postings | US$195,275+47% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Power BI | 1% of postings | A$147,500 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Engineering Management | 1% of postings | £95,000+31% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Penetration Testing | 1% of postings | £79,550+10% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Data Visualization | 1% of postings | £39,500−46% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Data Governance | 1% of postings | US$171,063+29% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Zero-Trust Architecture | 1% of postings | £72,000−1% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Scikit-learn | 1% of postings | £95,000+31% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Android | 0% of postings | US$150,000+13% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Agile Delivery | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Linux | 0% of postings | £70,000−3% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| GraphQL | 0% of postings | US$133,250 | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Computer Vision | 0% of postings | US$222,000+67% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Spring Boot | 0% of postings | US$143,826+8% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Data Engineering | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Jenkins | 0% of postings | £67,500−7% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Cloud Security | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| C# | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Jetpack Compose | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Ansible | 0% of postings | £70,000−3% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| GitHub Actions | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Data Science | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Network Security | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| .NET | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Test Automation | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Azure DevOps | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Identity & Access Management | 0% of postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Swift | 0% of postings | US$169,000+27% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Tableau | 0% of postings | £47,500−34% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| PyTorch | 0% of postings | £100,000+38% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Kotlin | 0% of postings | US$173,000+30% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| TensorFlow | 0% of postings | £100,000+38% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
Pass rate is the share of correct answers among people who practised that skill on Tarmac, a self-selected group rather than every developer, so read it as relative difficulty, not a universal stat. It comes from how people actually scored, not what anyone claimed, and a dash in that column means not enough people have practised the skill here yet. Leverage scores demand, pay, and difficulty together (out of 100); a higher score means a skill is both worth learning and worth your study time.
Skills on the rise
These names keep showing up in job posts faster than our topics cover them. It's an early read on where the market is heading, ranked by how much each one is climbing.
| Skill | Recent mentions | Trend |
|---|---|---|
| security clearance | 515 postings | Rising |
| embedded systems | 445 postings | Rising |
| mechanical engineering | 277 postings | Rising |
| microsoft 365 | 273 postings | Rising |
| risk management | 272 postings | Rising |
| cyber security | 254 postings | Rising |
| cybersecurity | 245 postings | Rising |
| real-time operating systems (rtos) | 217 postings | Rising |
| electrical engineering | 210 postings | Rising |
| real-time systems | 202 postings | Rising |
| endpoint security | 190 postings | Rising |
| sc clearance | 180 postings | Rising |
| aws certified cloud practitioner | 178 postings | Rising |
| salesforce | 172 postings | Rising |
| autocad | 168 postings | Rising |
| vendor management | 168 postings | Rising |
| excel | 164 postings | Rising |
| microsoft ai-900 | 164 postings | Rising |
| civil engineering | 160 postings | Rising |
| php | 151 postings | Rising |
| hardware-software integration | 144 postings | Rising |
| budget management | 140 postings | Rising |
| compliance | 136 postings | Rising |
| sharepoint | 131 postings | Rising |
These are skills named in recent job posts on the boards we track that don't yet match a topic on Tarmac, so the count is mentions across our tracked, ingested postings, not the whole market. We list them as an early read on what's rising, not a measure of adoption. Trend compares each skill's share of postings in the most recent three months with the three before, so a busier ingestion month doesn't make everything look like it's climbing.
Jobs data powered by Adzuna.