An O’Reilly analysis of how technology content is being consumed across its online learning platforms published this week indicates that while interest in most anything related to artificial intelligence (AI) is high, there has also been notable increases of interest in data engineering, security and data governance and the Rust programming language.
The report finds there has been a major increase of interest in topics such as GitHub Copilot (471%), prompt engineering (456%), AI principles (386%), and generative AI (289%). There was also a 29% increase in consumption of content related to data engineering skills, mainly thanks to the rise of AI.
However, there was a surprising 13% drop in the amount of content consumed that specially relates to ChatGPT.
At the same time, interest in traditional programming languages such as Python (5%) and Java (13%) declined, compared to a 10% increase in consumption of content relating to the Rust programming language.
Interest in governance, risk and compliance (GRC) surged by 44%, while interest in compliance skills rose by 10%. Additionally, content related to application security grew by 17%, while usage of content relating to a zero-trust model increased 13%. There was steady growth of interest in cybersecurity credentials with CISSP (11%) and CompTIA Security+ (13%) at the top of the list.
Finally, the report noted that interest in cloud computing appears to have plateaued, with content use for the major cloud providers and their certifications down across all categories except Google Cloud certifications, which experienced 2.2% growth.
Mike Loukides, vice president of emerging technology content at O’Reilly, said it’s difficult to correlate rising interest in one IT category at the expense of another, but it’s clear that significant shifts in terms of where IT professionals are investing in career development are underway. For example, the need for application developers isn’t going away any time soon, but more of them may be spending less time on coding in favor of tackling more complex challenges using AI tools, he noted.
While a triple percentage increase in consumption of AI content is indicative of growing interest, it’s also worth remembering there is a much larger base of developers consuming a wider range of content, so a double digit increase in, for example, consumption of security content might be equally or more significant.
The one thing that is certain is IT professionals need to continuously learn as the major advances continue to be made more rapidly than ever. Yesterday’s advanced certification in, for example, cloud computing is not as valuable as it once was, simply because the pool of IT talent that has that expertise has expanded. At the same time, advances in AI will continue to make a raft of technologies much more accessible to IT generalists.
That doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t necessarily be a need for IT professionals that specialize in specific areas, but it may be that their ability to command higher salaries may not be as great, as the demand for those skill sets in the AI era becomes less pronounced than it has historically been.
