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Bentley Unviersity Finds the Most Marketable Skills for Each Industry
By: Olivia Vanni
Unemployment and underemployment are all the rage with college graduates these days, much to their dismay. There’s so much talk now circulating about what students should and not take to increase their employability. And while there’s no magic major that will 100-percent guarantee that grads will lead a stable and successful professional life, there are certain skills that will give them more job prospects to work with.
Bentley University partnered with the market analytics firm Burning Glass and scrutinized 24.5 million job posts throughout the country. Their objective? To see which skills open up the most and best employment opportunities for people in or entering the workforce. Bentley and Burning Glass looked at which skills were linked to the most job postings, were the most generous in terms of salary and were the most promising based on demand growth.
The two organizations started with what they called “hybrid” skills. Employers today are looking for hires who demonstrate a mixture of technical skills and interpersonal skills, such as collaboration and decision making.
Here are just a handful of the top “hybrid” skills they found, as well as the factors making them so appealing throughout the job market:
SQL: Average salary - $93,154, Job openings - 726,698
Oracle: Average salary - $90,557, Job openings - 565,002
Business Development: Average salary - $80,887, Job openings - 475,525
Sales: Average salary - $70,470, Job openings - 890,710
Data Analysis: Average salary - $76,384, Job openings - 278,514
These hybrid skills aren’t for everyone (or for every industry for that matter). So Bentley and Burning Glass went one step further. They sifted through the job market data and pinpointed the skills most worth peoples' time to pursue depending on the line of work they’re going into.
If people are interested in maxing out the amount of money they can make, here are the different industries they can pursue, the most lucrative skill they can have and how much money that skill could make them.
Design: Software Engineering ($115,888)
Finance: Tax Planning ($96,590)
Human Resources: Organizational Analysis ($88,950)
Information Technology: Apache Hadoop ($124,535)
Management and Operations: Java ($103, 026)
Marketing and PR: Product Management ($106,348)
Research and Analysis: Python ($119,794)
Sales: Sales Planning ($107,603)
And if it’s job opportunities we’re talking about, there’s a whole other set of skills that will help individuals get ahead. The following list shows the same occupational areas as above, but it includes the most relevant skill and how many job postings were for professionals possessing these abilities.
Design: Adobe Photoshop (34,300)
Finance: Accounting (709,500)
Human Resources: Recruiting (77,100)
Information Technology: SQL (548,400)
Management and Operations: Business Analysis (103,600)
Marketing and Public Relations: Business Development and Sales (80,700)
Research and Analysis: Business Analysis (136,500)
Sales: Sales Management (223,900)
From all of this research, there isn’t one clear, universal skill that everyone should learn. These findings, however, have zeroed in on some specific knowledge that people might want to get after if they’re planning on making themselves as marketable as possible within their designated fields of work.
