Developers – trends to help choose your next move

With the end of another financial year fast approaching now is a great opportunity to take stock of the current market trends and provide a general update around the availability of jobs within the local development market.

As I write this blog we are currently assisting fifteen local businesses in trying to attract high calibre Microsoft developers to their businesses. That combined with other organisations that are always interested to know who becomes available in the market place, makes the permanent .Net development environment an incredibly buoyant market place at the moment.

As a result of this period of growth and demand we have seen a steady rise in the salaries on offer to individuals actively seeking new opportunities. This has also created a knock on effect to the overall market resulting in salary inflation across the board as existing businesses evaluate existing salaries and adjust accordingly to ensure their current teams are valued and retained.

From a technical perspective there appears to have been a significant shift for businesses adopting the MVC pattern however this shouldn’t be read as a move away from Webforms completely, more giving them the variety and options to win and deliver projects on a case by case basis. Attaining these skills externally has been extremely difficult for a number of companies and although more teams are now working this way it is unlikely to see a major uplift in active candidates with that knowledge.

There have also been more requests for individuals that have had exposure or experience with Entity Framework, this appears to be more frequent from some of the larger development houses who are delivering the more data heavy applications.

Finally the emergence of JavaScript applications has finally reached our local market and it appears that people are starting to look at this route for a lot of their future development work. This in turn has meant a substantial increase in requests for individuals with knowledge and exposure to the JavaScript libraries and frameworks such as AngularJS, Ember.js, Backbone.js and Knockout.js becoming regular entries on job specs as well as the classic JavaScript and jQuery.

So what do you think? Are you getting the exposure to the technology you want in your current role? Is your career following the path you want it? Have I missed anything that you’re getting asked about?

Please let me know your thoughts below and if you wish to discuss this further in more detail then please feel free to get in touch.