Report: Java & SQL the safest bets to land a job in IT in 2022

Java and SQL are the best programming languages to learn if you want to land a job in the IT industry in 2022. This finding is based on the insights from a report by DevSkiller, an HR tech company that specializes in tech talent assessment and management. Both languages topped the two first places in the ranking of IT skills sought after by hiring companies.

According to the data from the 4th edition of the Top IT Skills Report: Tech talent hiring insights, Java and SQL were each seen in 19% of coding test invites sent by tech recruiters via the DevSkiller platform. JavaScript, which tied for the first position with Java in 2020, slipped to the third position with 18% of test invites.

The high position of Java and SQL in the in-demand IT skills ranking shows that the tech recruitment space in 2021 was dominated by large corporations. As they were looking for reliable tech recruitment solutions like ours, we observed in our annual results revenue growth from the enterprise-grade client segment by 258% year over year.

Jakub Kubryński, DevSkiller CEO and co-founder

Top 5 most in-demand IT skills in 2021

The position of Java and SQL as the safest bets for entering the IT industry is further enhanced by a visible shortage of those skills on the market.

According to the DevSkiller report insights, Java and SQL developers wait the longest to complete their coding tests in comparison to specialists with other tech skills. One of the reasons behind this trend is that the recruitment pool is shallow and companies are competing for the same limited set of candidates.

In 2021, the average time to complete a Java coding test by a recruited candidate amounted to 4 days and 11 hours while in the case of SQL it was 3 days and 6 hours. The industry average for all languages in 2021 was 2 days and 16 hours.

On the other end of the spectrum, candidates taking Blockchain coding tests, consisting primarily of Solidity (the primary language for Ethereum) took only 10 hours to respond to their test invitation.

The average time to complete a coding test in 2021

What’s also worth noting from the perspective of landing a job in IT, is that the companies are not only looking for experienced developers. Around 75% of Java and SQL coding test invitations sent in 2021 were for junior and mid-developer roles.

The DevSkiller Top IT Skills Report: Tech talent hiring insights lays out the emerging trends of tech talent-hiring of the past year, as well as predictions for the next 12 months. The report’s findings are based on 102,869 coding tests sent through the DevSkiller platform to candidates from 191 countries between  December 1st, 2020 and December 1st, 2021.

A complimentary copy of the report is available here.

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DevSkiller is a Warsaw-based HR tech scale-up specializing in tech talent assessment and management. Its proprietary employee lifecycle management platform is used by 700+ companies from 90+ countries, spanning 6 continents. The platform consists of two main components: TalentScore and TalentBoost. The former streamlines the tech skills screening process, making it more efficient and candidate-friendly. The latter tackles key challenges in talent management, helping to identify skills gaps on a company level and gamify individual career paths.