JavaScript is one of the top programming languages required for employment. However, employers are usually looking for a combination of skills. Find out what else you should add to your resume to land your next JavaScript job.

The research comes from CV Compiler, a company which, as its name suggests, provides help with creating a convincing resume to developers and others in the software industry. In order to provide this guidance it  continuously keeps up to date with what employers' demands. For this survey of the Skills JavaScript Developers Need  the CV Compiler team took 300 job specs for JavaScript developers from AngelList, StackOverflow, LinkedIn, and career pages of fast-growing tech companies worldwide. Then using their own text analytics tool, they identified the terms which were mentioned the most frequently and created this chart: 

The first thing you notice about this list is that its a mix of things, dialects (or flavors) of JavaScript, JavaScript frameworks and libraries, other programming languages, programming methodologies and so on.

Actually that might not have been the first thing you notice - you might have been struck by the dominance of React. Even if you allow for the fact that any job opening for React requires JavaScript, the demand for this framework appears to be overwhelming. As there are only 300 job listings and React's main competitor Angular also has a high proportion of mentions, some openings must require multiple frameworks or one or more of a range of alternatives. Even so React's tally of 267 is outstanding, Angular has a highly creditable 195, whereas Vue only garners 44 mentions.

Commenting on this in the blog post Game of Frameworks, Andrew Stetsenko writes:

As you might have noticed, Vue.js was not so high in our skills rating. I guess there might be several reasons for that. First of all, not every company is ready to transfer their projects to Vue.js and discard more stable and common front-end solutions. Secondly, employers may want developers to learn Vue.js while working, so they don’t mention it in the initial job specs.

With regard to other frameworks, he also comments:

Surprisingly, the commonly-discussed Express.js (24) was mentioned less frequently, as was Flow (23). 

jQuery, which admittedly is on the wane, still has a good showing (63) so don't abandon it just yet, while Reactive Native which is gathering quite a lot of attention only has 30. 

Node.js, which is more than a framework - consider it JavaScript for everything server-side - is up near the top of the chart with 176.  Meanwhile Rest APIs, pretty essential to web programming but possibly now considered "old School" only has 53. Contrast this ti new kid on the block Redux, the open source JS library for managing application state used with Redux or Angular for building user interfaces has io7 mentions.

Something that struck me as strange was that ECMAScript is an entry in the chart, with 87 mentions. Given that JavaScript and ECMAScript are essentially one and the same, as discussed in JavaScript The Language With Two Names, this is something of an anomaly - but it does reflect long-standing confusion about what to call the language. You have to agree with Brendan Eich, JavaScript's creator, who said:

"ECMAScript was always an unwanted trade name that  sounds like a skin disease."

On the other hand calling it JavaScript leads people to think it is somehow related to Java - and this might be why Java is near the top of the chart with 84 mentions. Or its prominence is simply that it is the most prevalent programming language in the business/enterprise environment. Similarly Python getting 47 mentions reflects its current level of popularity.

TypeScript, the Microsoft-originated superset of JavaScript which, as its name suggests, adds strong typing to the language, is a flavor of JavaScript and existing JS programs should just work with it. So if you know JavaScript you simply need to learn about typing - although I'm still of the opinion that we're better off without it. 

Several of the entries suggest an emphasis on testing - Jest is a test framework, so is Mocha, Unit Testing and TDD (Test Driven developments) are approaches that put testing first. 

GIT (with 107 mentions) and Continuous Integration (62) were methodology/procedural terms included in the chart but as Stetsenko reveals in his blog one term that cropped up in half of job specs was excluded: 

Although the term Agile (150) wasn’t mentioned in the chart, it had even more counts than Git or Redux. That might look strange, but working and communicating effectively within a team is now comparable to the hard skills every JS dev should obtain.

So if you are job hunting don't forget to include your soft skills. 

• Ian Elliot is the author of Just JavaScript: An Idiomatic Approach; JavaScript Async; and Just jQuery: The Core UI  which are part of the I Programmer Library published by I/O Press.

More Information

CV Compiler

Game of Frameworks: JavaScript trends of 2019

Related Articles

JavaScript The Language With Two Names    

jQuery Still Our Favourite Framework 

Survey Reveals JavaScript Trends

Facebook Releases React Native

JavaScript Ecosystem Under Scrutiny

Language Learning Insights From HackerRank 2019 Survey

Programming Languages Not To Learn First

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

<ASIN:1871962579>

<ASIN:1871962560>

<ASIN:1871962501>

<ASIN:1871962528>