Which technology skillsets should your customers invest in? PluralSight’s Technology Index might make the decision easier – it aggregates some 23 billion data points every month to rank some of the hottest skillsets for software development, IT ops, data and security teams.
According to PluralSight, the index incorporates data from more than 850 growth technologies – including JavaScript, Python, C#, Linux, MacOS, Ubuntu, R, Microsoft SQL Server, MATLAB, Kali Linux, CISSP, CloudFlare and more.
“Our goal is to provide an unbiased perspective on technology demand,” explains PluralSight on its FAQs and methodology statement for the index.
“To achieve this, we don’t apply any weighting techniques to these technologies. Early in the creation of the index, we realised that if we were to arbitrarily assign weights to either older/mature technologies or newer/unknown technologies, it might undermine that central principle.”
PluralSight’s core offering is a tech-focused learning platform. Via diverse courses and technology pathways, techies can add new skills without stepping away from the race to digitally transform the enterprise. PluralSight plans include options for teams and individual professionals.
What’s often difficult is deciding exactly which skillsets to develop, so a resource like the Technology Index can help dispel doubts and confusion about the best pathway.
The PluralSight Technology Index uses data from eight sources, including GitHub, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Google AdWords, YouTube, Google Search, Indeed and Dice to calculate the proportional popularity of a technology versus the other technologies on which data is gathered.
“We use a simple moving average at the data source level, using a rolling three-month window for the calculations. We average the proportional popularity of a technology over three months for each data source to find our overall proportional popularity,” PluralSight explains.
“Then, to reduce the effect of any outliers, the index takes the median of the proportional popularities for each technology, from the various data sources, and then rescales so the results sum to one.”
Additional resources for customers
PluralSight also provides other resources, including case studies, webinars, and an expert blog, to assist potential customers. Examples include a step-by-step explainer on how to customise ASP.NET containers with Docker, by Wahlin Consulting‘s Dan Wahlin.
As Wahlin notes, an application may work well locally but run into issues once moved to a different environment.
“This problem always raises the same questions. What’s the difference between my machine and the target environment? Was an environment variable missing? Was a different security patch applied? Did some other elusive problem cause the issue?”
Docker with Dockerfiles, Wahlin says, can be used to create custom images to help counter this problem. Read his full blog post here.
