odinjobs wrote:Out of around 100 IT skills, PHP ranks 51st as far as demand (number of jobs posted online this year).
I'm going to take a wild guess here and try to work out how you came to that conclusion.
You wrote (or had someone write for you) an application to collate "required skills" keywords posted in job adverts.
You ran it against a database of current job adverts.
PHP came 51st.
It looks to me like something is very wrong with your data. Let's think about it for a moment.
1. It's taking the "requirements" listed by recruiters. These generally bear no relation to what the job requires, they're a list of things recruiters think potential applicants will search for added so the advert comes up regardless of what the candidate really wants.
2. Whether a PHP job will show up depends where you look. If you take job adverts from the bigger job websites they won't appear very often. This isn't because PHP is unpopular, it's because PHP jobs tend to be with small web development companies who don't use the sort of recruitment companies who advertise on the big sites. A lot of PHP jobs are only advertised on the company website of whoever wants to recruit a developer.
3. You've ignored the fact that a lot of IT job postings (quite rightly) list certain IT skills as requirements no matter what the job is; things like "effective communication skills" and "good problem solving ability". These terms will appear pretty much 100% of the time so it'll look like all the languages appear quite far down the list, making it look like no particular language is in demand at all.
4. Your post implies that you selected 100 IT skills and looked at their popularity. The quality of the results will depend very much on your ability to pick which 100 skills are important. Looking at the "Top Skills" list on your site would indicate "Cognos" or "Peoplesoft" are more in demand than PHP. That sounds awfully unlikely to me.
5. According to the Tiobe index (
http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm ) PHP is the 5th most popular of all programming languages in existence. Your list is practically the opposite of the Tiobe index.
6. I don't have any current stats but I'm pretty sure PHP is still the most widely used language for websites and web applications. Again, your list has some pretty obscure IT skills seemingly more in demand.