Blockchain Demand Increases 552% — Virtualization Review

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Digital & IT Skills Report: Blockchain Demand Increases 552%

Despite the “crypto winter” that roiled the cryptocurrency market late last year, demand for workers skilled in the underlying technology, blockchain, increased by 552 percent in 2022.

That’s an important part of a new report from DevSkiller, an “HR tech scale-up” that specializes in talent assessment and management. The DevSkiller Digital & IT Skills Report 2023 is based on a year’s worth of internal data mined from the company’s cloud platform that helps organizations find, evaluate and grow talent using tests and other techniques.

Note that for the report the company separates “digital” and “IT” skills:

• Digital skills: These include computer literacy, data entry, social media, online communication and research, word processing and secure information management.
• IT skills: These include programming, web and app development, digital business analytics, digital design and data visualization, digital product management, data science and user experience design.

“The tech talent job market is splitting into two types of roles, each with a different type of desired skills,” commented CEO and founder Jakub Kubryński. “On the one hand, we observe a growing demand for roles that require deep technical expertise and sophisticated IT skills such as Cloud Native Java. On the other hand, companies expect a certain level of ‘softer’ digital skills even from traditionally non-technical skills employees .”

As shown in the graphic below, blockchain was by far the fastest growing technology on the company’s platform, despite the aforementioned crypto winter.

“Interest in blockchain is on the rise likely due to its improved security, greater transparency and immediate traceability,” the report said. “Companies are changing or adding blockchain to their existing architecture, so the demand for developers who can implement this technology is increasing.”

Digging deeper into the blockchain space, the report also identifies the most in-demand specific skills, topped by Solidity, a statically typed curly braces programming language designed to develop smart contracts that run on Ethereum, the blockchain for the Ether cryptocurrency.

While blockchain accounted for the largest growth last year (specifically, December 1, 2021 to December 1, 2022), the most popular technology is JavaScript, which surpassed Java in this year’s report.

An interesting note from the report is that slightly more than half of the 2022 skills assessment invitations were for junior developers, while about 18 percent were for mid-level developers and about 31 percent were for senior developers and engineers.

“The competence threshold even for the mid-level positions hangs quite high,” said Kubryński. “As a result, many companies are adjusting their recruitment strategies to focus on acquiring high-potential juniors who can later be upgraded. On top of that, we are seeing a growing demand for a seamless and efficient way to retrain current employees to limit layoffs.”

Indeed, layoffs weighed heavily in the report, and came amid widespread and growing fears of an economic recession.

Presenting a chart from the Layoffs Tracker website, the report said: “One-third of our surveyed clients said they believe hiring freezes are most likely to occur in 2023. “Deep-rooted and long-term supply dynamics will continue to be a major force creating a persistent gap between employer demand for new hires and the supply of candidates,’ according to Indeed and Glassdoor’s Workplace Trends 2023.”

The report said: “The best way your organization can prepare for potential hiring freezes is to look internally for internal candidates. It’s time to assess and map individuals’ skills. Once you have a clearer understanding, you can create training and programs to increase the skills of and upskill your employees. You can use the skills-based approach to shift your employees’ focus to projects rather than their job roles.”

The report’s findings are based on 209,249 coding tests sent through the DevSkiller platform to candidates from 54 countries.