Research from TotallyMoney suggests that coding skills are a great investment in terms of future salary and employability.
Learning a new skill can be a great way to boost your career or steer it in a new direction – but what is a good area to focus on?
Credit data and reports provider TotallyMoney has carried out a study of salary brackets for jobs that involve various skills, based on an analysis of roles according to Google search terms.
The findings suggest that coding skills are among the best for securing workers the highest potential salary. TotallyMoney found that four out of five of the highest paying roles in the UK were related to coding – with average salaries for those with Ruby coding skills, for example, ranging from £57,500 to £78,076.
Also included in TotallyMoney’s top five for salary potential were Java, Python, cloud computing and Agile business skills.
The study also looked at which skills are the most in demand. Data skills came out on top here, with reportedly more than 30,000 jobs in the sector available across the UK.
In terms of language skills, Spanish was the most popular to learn and ranked second in languages for the highest earning potential, but it ranked in the bottom 20 for employability.
Meanwhile, German was found to be a less popular option but had a higher employability potential – TotallyMoney said that jobs requiring German were nearly twice as common as those in need of Spanish skills.
In terms of top business skills, based on employability and salary potential, it listed data, scrum, project management and HTML skills. For more creative skills, it listed animation, Photoshop, Illustrator and copywriting.
Henry Keegan, head of search at TotallyMoney, said: “Finding the right skill to learn can be tricky, especially when there’s so many to choose from. It’s important to take in a number of factors such as the future potential earnings, the cost of learning the skill and whether there is actually a demand for it.”
TotallyMoney has created some infographics to help visualise what it has deemed to be the top skills to learn this year. In terms of ‘overall best skills’ to learn, coding dominated the top five, which featured Python, Java, Ruby, data skills and Javascript.
Check out the ‘best 10 overall skills’ below, or click here to view some of the other categories.
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