What Technology We 'Learned' In 2018 - Forbes

Aaron Skonnard, co-founder and CEO, Pluralsight.Pluralsight

If you want to know what’s top of the classic rock billboard charts, you need to assess what tracks people are listening to, streaming, purchasing and downloading. If you want to know who’s topping the world’s most powerful people list or update yourself on the America or Europe’s top 50 women in tech, then you look at the Forbes Lists pages. But if you want to know what software technologies are being learned, consumed and used most fervently, there’s really no global barometer to give us the top ten.

In the absence of an international technology ‘hot or not’ list, we can perhaps look at what people are spending most time getting themselves educated in.

Technical training

As we have discussed before here on Forbes, Utah-headquartered Pluralsight specializes in technical training content and skills management for businesses. The company’s Pluralsight Role IQ provides a technical skills benchmarking function to help CIOs and CTOs qualify and quantify their teams' IT skills. So then, with 2018 behind us, what technology skills did people want to learn throughout 2018?

Pluralsight provides all its training online through a cloud-based subscription model. This means it is able to collate a monthly average ‘view time’ to gauge what people are most interested in. The top four courses (category: exact course) are as follows:

• Software Development: Getting started with Angular -- an open source framework for building web apps.
• IT Ops -- An IT ‘operations’ (i.e. IT back office ) course designed for people who want to learn to be systems administrators in Amazon Web Services environments.
• Information & Cyber Security -- a course designed for people who want to know what ‘ethical hacking’ is (i.e. ways to provide penetration testing or intrusion testing on your own company’s network).
• Data Professional: -- a course designed to provide an introduction to SQL (Structured Query Language), a programming language used for managing data in relational database management systems.

Pluralsight is part of Utah’s burgeoning ‘Silicon Slopes’ technology hub in Salt Lake City. The company works from its Beehive State offices to serve online course students (many of whom will typically be working professionals) all over the world.

A survey released by the company this week shows that the most popular technologies by world region are split. The Angular web app framework course is popular San Francisco, USA; Bangalore, India; and Beijing, China. Equally, the Python software language course is popular in New York City, USA; Boston, USA; and London, UK.

"Companies used to adopt technologies based largely on whether or not they could hire the right people. That's no longer an option. Companies can’t hire or fire their way to success anymore. Huge enterprises are being disrupted by smaller startups who are using technology to completely change long-standing business models. To compete, enterprises must act differently by quickly adopting new technologies, many of which are updated more frequently than we’ve ever experienced. CIOs and CTOs in every industry need to know the technologies in the market, analyze their capabilities, decide which ones will take their company where it needs to go, and then continually upskill their teams to match their evolving tech strategy, which, today, is their corporate strategy,” said Aaron Skonnard, co-founder and CEO, Pluralsight.

The big top 10

In terms of the most popular software development technologies from from Pluralsight’s Tech Index as of December 24th, 2018 -- the company lists the top 10 as follows: JavaScript; Java; HTML; C; Git; C++; Python; CSS; Blockchain and SQL. According to Don Jones, Pluralsight’s VP of content partnerships & strategic initiatives, seeing Javascript, HTML and CSS in the top 10 is hardly surprising.

“They’re the bedrock for the vast majority of what users see and experience online and in their mobile devices, powering everything from simple websites to the complex, rich web applications many companies now use as first-line productivity tools. Seeing technologies like Java, C++ and SQL in the top 10 really demonstrates that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Huge businesses have built their livelihoods on these stalwarts… and they continue to play central roles in many business’ back-end code bases,” said Jones.

Future trends

In terms of what comes next, Pluralsight points to technologies including Microsoft Flow and Microsoft PowerApps. Microsoft Flow is a cloud-based service for non-technical line-of-business users to build workflows that automate time-consuming business tasks and processes across applications and services. Microsoft PowerApps is in a similar category in that it features a simple nice drag-and-drop user interface to allow users to construct a mobile app.

Along with the widely discussed rise of so-called low-code programming tools, the empowerment of non-programmers to create automations that may be mission-critical to the businesses is certainly a trend to look out for.

The software industry is constantly working to reinvent itself so, as technical as some aspects of this story are, it is arguably interesting for all of us to see what technical tools are most popular, what continues to be useful and what new developments are coming to the fore.

Global tech hubs... and what they like most.Pluralsight

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