The Wall Street Journal reports today that job site Indeed.com saw triple the postings including IT Puppet as a requirement for the period between April and June this year compared to the same period last year. Puppet is an open source IT automation tool commercialized by Puppet Labs. It’s become extremely popular in the burgeoning DevOps movement. Meanwhile positions including Hadoop more than doubled.

Here’s a chart of Puppet’s long term growth trends from Indeed.com Job Trends:

Puppet Job Trends

Puppet jobs

The WSJ lists the following as the fastest growing skills on Indeed.com:

• HTML5
• iOS
• Android
• Mobile app
• Puppet
• Hadoop
• jQuery
• PaaS
• Social Media
• Sharepoint

However, the list on the Indeed.com Job Trends is a little different:

1. HTML5
2. Mobile app
3. Android
4. Twitter
5. jQuery
6. Facebook
7. Social Media
8. iPhone
9. Cloud Computing
10. Virtualization

It could be that the WSJ is using year-over-year statistics while the listing on Indeed.com are using a different metric.

Here’s another look at the big data job market that Alex Williams explored earlier this month.

Don’t Forget Legacy Technology

The WSJ also notes that Dice.com, which focuses exclusively on IT jobs, saw strong growth in recruiters searching for workers with Java skills. Earlier this year Dennis B. Moore analyzed Dice’s listings and found that Java is extremely popular. Growth in Android and Hadoop should reinforce that.

Services Angle

It’s clear that the demand for people skilled in the sorts of technologies we’ve been covering – mobile, big data, cloud computing, Platform-as-a-Service, NoSQL and DevOps – are becoming more sought after. It’s not the end of the line for legacy technology, but there’s a clear message here: companies are going to need to invest in training employees in new technologies, and workers who want to keep an edge in the job market should invest time in learning these new skills. Cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud give workers the opportunity to play with these new technologies at affordable prices, and open source can provide hands-on projects for learning.

Photo by totalAldo