Highest-leverage developer skills to learn
If you only have time to learn a few things, learn these. Each skill below is scored on three things at once: how often employers ask for it, what it pays over a typical developer role, and how often people actually pass it when they practise. The skills that are in demand, pay well, and trip people up are the ones worth your study time. They sit at the top.
| Skill | Market demand | Median pay | Pass rate | Leverage | Practice |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JavaScript | 15% of postings15,330 postings | £72,500−3% | 47%36 attempts | 42 | Practice |
| Machine Learning | 7% of postings7,536 postings | US$181,900+37% | 73%30 attempts | 32 | Practice |
| Python | 48% of postings50,058 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Databases & SQL | 42% of postings43,299 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| AWS | 36% of postings37,858 postings | £80,000+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| System Design | 23% of postings24,351 postings | £87,500+17% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| HTTP & APIs | 21% of postings21,481 postings | £77,500+3% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| AI Engineering | 20% of postings20,343 postings | £80,000+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| CI-CD Pipelines | 19% of postings20,214 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Docker | 18% of postings19,049 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Kubernetes | 16% of postings16,986 postings | £80,000+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| DevOps | 14% of postings14,637 postings | £78,000+4% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| React | 13% of postings13,552 postings | £77,000+3% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Agile Delivery | 12% of postings12,892 postings | A$128,749+17% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| TypeScript | 11% of postings11,901 postings | £80,000+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Microsoft Azure | 11% of postings11,145 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Terraform | 11% of postings11,019 postings | £80,000+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Java | 10% of postings10,377 postings | £80,000+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Data Engineering | 9% of postings9,639 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Linux | 9% of postings9,435 postings | £70,000−7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Git | 7% of postings7,775 postings | £68,000−9% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Cloud Security | 6% of postings6,713 postings | A$118,750+8% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Apache Spark | 6% of postings6,117 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Node.js | 6% of postings6,081 postings | £80,000+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Data Science | 6% of postings6,055 postings | US$165,000+24% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Test Automation | 5% of postings5,583 postings | £71,250−5% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Google Cloud Platform | 5% of postings5,573 postings | £95,000+27% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| CSS | 5% of postings5,208 postings | US$180,000+35% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Go | 5% of postings5,175 postings | US$193,500+45% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Engineering Management | 5% of postings5,020 postings | A$103,950−6% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Snowflake | 5% of postings4,753 postings | £76,000+1% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| C++ | 5% of postings4,718 postings | £70,000−7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Network Security | 4% of postings4,575 postings | A$110,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| dbt | 4% of postings4,414 postings | £80,000+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Identity & Access Management | 4% of postings4,376 postings | A$128,749+17% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| C# | 4% of postings4,009 postings | £70,000−7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Databricks | 4% of postings3,826 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| AI Coding Tools | 4% of postings3,807 postings | A$113,658+3% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Web Platform | 4% of postings3,757 postings | US$185,138+39% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Apache Airflow | 3% of postings3,526 postings | £82,500+10% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| .NET | 3% of postings3,429 postings | £70,000−7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| SIEM & SOAR | 3% of postings3,418 postings | £72,250−4% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Data Governance | 3% of postings3,251 postings | A$135,000+23% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| NoSQL Datastores | 3% of postings3,115 postings | £95,000+27% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Vulnerability Management | 3% of postings3,096 postings | A$150,000+36% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| GitHub Actions | 3% of postings2,943 postings | £67,500−10% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Spring Boot | 3% of postings2,872 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Power BI | 3% of postings2,835 postings | A$135,000+23% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| MLOps | 3% of postings2,803 postings | £100,000+33% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Apache Kafka | 3% of postings2,794 postings | £90,000+20% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Azure DevOps | 2% of postings2,590 postings | £67,500−10% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Data Visualization | 2% of postings2,540 postings | US$130,000−2% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Threat Modeling | 2% of postings2,307 postings | £79,550+6% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Ansible | 2% of postings2,236 postings | £80,000+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Jenkins | 2% of postings2,115 postings | £67,500−10% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| SAST & DAST Tooling | 2% of postings1,977 postings | £80,000+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Angular | 2% of postings1,839 postings | £67,500−10% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Behavioral | 2% of postings1,834 postings | £85,000+13% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| PyTorch | 2% of postings1,690 postings | £80,500+7% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Tableau | 1% of postings1,393 postings | £50,000−33% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Kotlin | 1% of postings1,377 postings | US$170,000+28% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Rust | 1% of postings1,367 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| R | 1% of postings1,272 postings | A$123,237+12% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| React Native | 1% of postings1,265 postings | US$175,000+31% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Android | 1% of postings1,202 postings | US$170,000+28% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Scikit-learn | 1% of postings1,185 postings | £82,000+9% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Swift | 1% of postings1,177 postings | US$169,050+27% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Zero-Trust Architecture | 1% of postings1,176 postings | £79,100+5% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| TensorFlow | 1% of postings1,161 postings | £75,000 | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| GraphQL | 1% of postings1,107 postings | A$40,475−63% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Penetration Testing | 1% of postings1,094 postings | £67,500−10% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Scala | 1% of postings1,032 postings | £67,500−10% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Computer Vision | 1% of postings787 postings | A$90,000−18% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| ML Systems | 0% of postings465 postings | A$82,620−25% | Not enough data yet | — | — |
| Jetpack Compose | 0% of postings374 postings | US$177,500+33% | Not enough data yet | — | Practice |
| Geometric Deep Learning | 0% of postings31 postings | — | Not enough data yet | — | — |
Pass rate is the share of correct answers among people who practised that skill on Tarmac, a self-selected group rather than every developer, so read it as relative difficulty, not a universal stat. It comes from how people actually scored, not what anyone claimed, and a dash in that column means not enough people have practised the skill here yet. Leverage scores demand, pay, and difficulty together (out of 100); a higher score means a skill is both worth learning and worth your study time.
Skills on the rise
These names keep showing up in job posts faster than our topics cover them. It's an early read on where the market is heading, ranked by how much each one is climbing.
| Skill | Recent mentions | Trend |
|---|---|---|
| azure/identity-access | 535 postings535 total · 0.0% → 0.7% | Rising |
| azure/compute | 522 postings522 total · 0.0% → 0.6% | Rising |
| azure/storage | 482 postings482 total · 0.0% → 0.6% | Rising |
| autocad | 562 postings645 total · 0.4% → 0.7% | Rising |
| salesforce | 526 postings595 total · 0.3% → 0.7% | Rising |
| microsoft 365 | 660 postings824 total · 0.7% → 0.8% | Rising |
| vue.js | 422 postings486 total · 0.3% → 0.5% | Rising |
| embedded systems | 703 postings942 total · 1.0% → 0.9% | Steady |
| microsoft excel | 389 postings445 total · 0.2% → 0.5% | Rising |
| matlab | 324 postings346 total · 0.1% → 0.4% | Rising |
| iso 27001 | 375 postings428 total · 0.2% → 0.5% | Rising |
| excel | 425 postings511 total · 0.4% → 0.5% | Rising |
| mechanical engineering | 499 postings633 total · 0.6% → 0.6% | Rising |
| electrical engineering | 412 postings515 total · 0.4% → 0.5% | Rising |
| azure/compute/azure-functions | 230 postings230 total · 0.0% → 0.3% | Rising |
| azure/networking | 226 postings226 total · 0.0% → 0.3% | Rising |
| rabbitmq | 278 postings309 total · 0.1% → 0.3% | Rising |
| ruby | 314 postings366 total · 0.2% → 0.4% | Rising |
| sharepoint | 353 postings429 total · 0.3% → 0.4% | Rising |
| cissp | 270 postings300 total · 0.1% → 0.3% | Rising |
| microsoft office | 321 postings382 total · 0.3% → 0.4% | Rising |
| power automate | 301 postings360 total · 0.3% → 0.4% | Rising |
| civil engineering | 328 postings405 total · 0.3% → 0.4% | Rising |
| device drivers | 263 postings306 total · 0.2% → 0.3% | Rising |
These are skills named in recent job posts on the boards we track that don't yet match a topic on Tarmac, so the count is mentions across our tracked, ingested postings, not the whole market. We list them as an early read on what's rising, not a measure of adoption. Trend compares each skill's share of postings in the most recent three months with the three before, so a busier ingestion month doesn't make everything look like it's climbing.
Vacancy and salary data includes Adzuna.