The fields of web and mobile development are growing rapidly. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor is forecasting the job market for Developers will grow another 15 percent by 2026.
Here's a look at the current state of the development field.
As demand for Developers continues to grow, the development workforce has to welcome a lot of new talent. Our survey findings again confirm that this is the case. 54 percent of our development respondents began their career in a field other than development.
Despite this, 44 percent of respondents have more than five years of experience, with 38 percent at a senior role or higher.
In terms of specializations, 50 percent of Developers are working in front-end or full-stack development.
Development respondents said their teams tend to be a bit bigger than those of our data respondents, as 54 percent were on teams larger than 10 people, including 15 percent with teams larger than 100.
When it comes to the programming languages that Developers are using at work, JavaScript is by far the most widely used language, with 75 percent of respondents citing it. This was followed by SQL, at 47 percent. However, 86 percent, use Git for version control.
When asked about the overall level of development literacy outside of the development team at their organization, 78 percent responded with intermediate or higher.
The high percentage of development literacy across organizations was surprising, but breaking the data down further, we found that the more senior an employee is, the higher they rated the development literacy in their organization. One reason for this may be that senior employees often work with more highly qualified individuals within the company. They may also have a better grasp of employee skills competency because they're involved in the hiring process.
A massive 80 percent of Web Developers feel that digital skills training would make them more successful.
This is indicative of how quickly things can change on the tech front; even the most successful Developers need to keep up. There are also higher expectations that professionals have a multi-disciplinary toolkit. Fittingly, 52 percent of Developers felt that additional development skills would most improve their workplace success, followed by data (20 percent) and design (12 percent).
In terms of advancing their own development skills, respondents most frequently use social and digital forms of learning. The top three resources Developers use to learn new techniques or ideas are online forums, digital skills training, and blogs.
30 percent of Developers also felt that additional development skills would make their organizations more successful, with 21 percent choosing data instead.
When it comes to learning opportunities and training, Developers cite online courses as the most frequent format for improving their skills.
Looking forward to 2020, we asked Developers which trends they think will have the greatest impact on the field.
On the five-year horizon, developer respondents said that they feel AI (86 percent) and machine learning (84 percent) will have the biggest impact, followed by IoT (54 percent).
Like other fields in the survey, AI and machine learning came out on top, with 86 and 84 percent of respondents saying those will have the most impact on development in the next five to 10 years. These were followed closely by internet-of-things (IoT) at 54 percent.
While Developers see these trends as impactful, very few have actual experience working with these technologies. 83 percent of Developers have never worked with any artificial intelligence platforms or blockchain technology, and only 17 percent have any experience with IoT devices.