I am hiring, and because this is new to me, I researched a bit how companies are recruiting nowadays, and where (Indeed seems to be the incumbent).

Going through the job description I noticed how many skills requirements drastically limit their target audience by including long lists of technologies and tools. I gathered the following list from just a handful of job descriptions:

Rundeck, Jira, Jenkins, UrbanCode, ServiceNow, Git(hub), Python, Flask, Bootstrap, PHP, Golang, Ansible, React, Angular, Docker, Kubernetes, Javascript, HTML5, Java, Node.js, CSS, R, AWS, Sonar, Fortity, Polymer/Lit, Hadoop, Elastic.

Sites list these technologies as prerequisites. This will put off very good people that just have not acquired a specific tool-skill yet. On the other hand very good people that have too much of a preference for the latest and hottest tool, may be put off by these specific tech lists.

More importantly, the variety in the list above seems to imply that tools are not as important a skills as the eagerness and ability to quickly learn new skills and tools. And also it warns you that if your skills are too narrowly based on specific tools, you may be sailing in shallow water.

The Human Capital Trends 2019 report from Deloitte similarly predicts a future of jobs where new skills needs “are forcing organizations to create more flexible and evolving, less rigidly defined positions and roles”.

We will need to learn lots of skills and tools. But we only know which ones, when it happens.