What’s the top skill entry-level candidates should have when entering today’s job market? According to data collected from the recruiters that use our platform, Microsoft Excel still reigns supreme as an essential skill for recent college grads.
The insight comes from data collected through our matching process, which asks university recruiters to weigh the importance of factors like GPA, major, previous internships, school prestige as well as request specific skills so our technology can match their job opportunities with the best student candidates.
While Excel (and the entire Microsoft Office Suite) was a commonly requested skill across all roles on our platform, programming and data analysis skills were prioritized as a whole.
Programming languages made the list of the most in-demand skills, with Python taking the top spot as most commonly requested programming language, followed by Java, R, and C++. Also present on the list were a number of tools and languages used in statistics and data science, including database management language SQL, data visualization tool Tableau, MATLAB, analytics software SAS, and statistical software Stata.
It seems that the broader set of skills that recruiters prioritize in entry-level candidates fall under programming or data science, which is unsurprising given the demand for qualified candidates in those fields. The dominance of technical skills was also present in LinkedIn’s recently-released list of the most in-demand hard skills of 2019. LinkedIn’s list looked at the most in-demand skills across its entire platform and included skills such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and mobile application development. Excel wasn’t listed on LinkedIn’s list of most in-demand skills, but it’s clear that the university recruiters on our platform are looking for candidates that have a strong foundation of hard skills – like Excel or Python – in which they can build on.
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