There are over 2.8 million tech practitioners and leaders from around the world on the O’Reilly learning platform—from straight-out-of-university coders to members of the C-suite. Every year, O’Reilly takes a detailed look at how those customers have used their platform in order to find out what users are interested in (and how that changed from years prior) and make determinations about where tech is headed.
The tech trends they found are pretty fascinating, and also useful for tech leaders and learning and development (L&D) professionals. Here are some of the key takeaways, but we recommend downloading the full report for far more details and insights.
L&D has increased in importance for organisations
O’Reilly saw total platform usage grow by 14.1% year-over-year, more than doubling the 6.2% gain they saw between 2020 and 2021. Organisations, particularly those in the tech sector, have struggled in recent years to find and hire the talent they need. It’s likely that more companies are turning to L&D as a solution—upskilling existing team members on new technologies for their organisations to leverage.
The most popular searches—and what’s gaining
The most popular searches on O’Reilly? Python, Kubernetes, and Java. But the biggest gains year-over-year were for the CompTIA Linux+ certification, the CompTIA A+ certification, and transformers (the AI model that’s led to tremendous progress in natural language processing).
The topics O’Reilly users are focused on most
O’Reilly users are most interested in content on software development (31% of all usage in 2022), IT operations (18%), business (13%), security (8%), and web and mobile (6%). These users are solidly technical, focused on software rather than hardware, but with a significant stake in business topics.
Go and Rust are gaining ground
Java and Python still top the programming language charts, but Go (20% year-over-year growth) and Rust (22%) are overtaking from behind. In a few more years, Go and Rust may be challenging Java and Python directly. So, those are languages your team should pay attention to.
AI winter? Unlikely.
With all the huge advances in AI over the last year or so, it’s no surprise there’s been a huge demand by O’Reilly members for content on natural language processing (42% growth) and deep learning (23% growth) as well as continued interest in tools like scikit-learn, PyTorch, and TensorFlow.
Heads are increasingly in the cloud
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are still the “big three” cloud providers. But O’Reilly users are more focused on high-level issues that will help them take their organisations all the way to the cloud, with year-over-year growth in cloud migration (45%), cloud service models (41%), and hybrid clouds (28%).
How organisations are securing their systems
Computer security has only become more difficult. So it’s good news that O’Reilly users are focused on network security (32% growth), hardening systems (90%), secure coding (40%), advanced persistent threats (55%), application security (46%), and zero trust (a whopping 146% growth year-over-year).
The most popular security certifications
Security professionals love their certifications, but they love the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) and CompTIA’s Security+ the best.
It’s about more than just tech
Product development isn’t just about code; it relies heavily on communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. So it’s no surprise O’Reilly users are building their leadership and management skills (38% growth year-over-year).
This is just a blog-appropriate sampling of what you can glean from the entire O’Reilly 2023 Technology Trends report. It’s 51 pages of useful information—and a far better measure of what’s trending than anything that happens among the Twitterati. It includes the methodology for how O’Reilly leveraged its data to generate such engaging insights, the big-picture high-level things to know, and the devils that are in the details. Highly recommended.
And the good news—it’s free. Check it out for yourself here.
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