A significant chunk of today’s digital market comprises companies with software, applications, or platforms as their primary offering and seek individuals that can help develop innovative and cutting-edge solutions.
According to a report by Statista, the global market for mobile applications is projected to reach $935 billion by 2023, up from $365 billion in 2018.
As a result, there has been an exponential spike in demand for application development skills in the past few years, making it highly desirable for both Talent Acquisition and Talent Development professionals.
Application development skills are the technical abilities and knowledge required to create software applications for various platforms, such as desktops, mobile devices, and web browsers. These skills include proficiency in programming languages, knowledge of application development frameworks and tools, understanding of software architecture and design patterns, experience with databases, APIs and user interface design, project management methodologies, and much more.
Although Application Development Skills have always been in demand within the tech sector, their sudden increase in dependency can be credited to the rise of cloud computing and the increasing use of software as a service (SaaS) solutions. As more businesses move their operations to the cloud, there is a growing need for applications that can be easily deployed and managed on these platforms. Hence, developers with the necessary skills are in high demand.
In addition, nowadays, application development skills are not limited to traditional software development roles. These skills are increasingly in demand across various industries, including healthcare, finance, and retail, as more businesses seek to create custom applications to streamline operations, improve customer experiences, and gain a competitive advantage.
According to a survey conducted by AppDynamics, 95% of global enterprises have embarked on a digital transformation journey, with 73% of them having specific application development initiatives in place.
This is why, in this month’s Skills Report, we discuss application development skills that are a must-have for your organization and can help you get an edge over your competitors. Let’s get started!
The vast Application Development skills umbrella can be divided into five sub-categories:
With the shift towards a mobile-first design approach and the rise of Progressive Web Apps (PWA), front-end application development skills are evolving at an unprecedented rate. To stay competitive in this highly cut-throat market, hiring and L&D managers should aim for these skills when hiring a new front-end developer or upskilling your existing professionals:
Rather than building monolithic applications, developers now create smaller, more modular services (called microservices) that can be easily deployed and scaled independently in the cloud using services such as AWS and Azure. This, combined with the other latest developments in the field, often results in skill gaps, which can only be tackled by the knowledge of reliable and evergreen backend languages such as:
With the growth of different mobile platforms, developers need to design and develop apps that work seamlessly across multiple platforms. Cross-platform development tools and frameworks such as React Native and Flutter are becoming increasingly popular, enabling developers to create apps that can run on both iOS and Android devices. Apart from them, developers still require the knowledge of platform-specific skills such as:
As ML models become more sophisticated and complex, the demand for explainable AI is also increasing for technical and non-technical stakeholders. Additionally, there has been an increased focus on the ethical consideration of data science and ML models, which needs to be tackled by a clear and in-depth understanding of skills such as:
With the increasing demand for real-time data processing, developers need to understand how to build applications that can handle real-time data streaming and processing using technologies such as Apache Kafka and Apache Flink. Additionally, since most of today's applications are hosted on the cloud, knowledge of cloud-based databases such as Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL is in demand for DB developers. Other essential skills that you should consider while hiring a DB developer in today’s market are:
In addition to the skills mentioned above, here are a few other crucial application development skills you should have in your skills library:
As application development trends change with time and technological disruptions, new application development skills may appear in the near future. As Talent Acquisition and Development professionals, we must keep track of all the relevant application development or mobile application development skills in our skills inventory and update them timely by either hiring new talent or upskilling/reskilling existing developers in our workforce.
We hope this article was helpful to you. We’ll be back with some more trending skills next month. Meanwhile, don’t forget to share your thoughts and feedback with us at marketing@imocha.io.