Job Market April 13, 2026 · 4 min read

The fastest-growing skill in job postings right now

Guess what is the fastest growing skill in job postings right now — and which skills are losing their momentum.

I am tracking Tech and Finance job listings to show which skills and roles are getting more demand from employers.

My goal is not to contribute to the speculation on how AI will impact our jobs. Instead, to show data on what is actually happening, so we can all build a strategy accordingly.

Here is what happened from January to March:

1 — 'Claude' is THE skill to master

Claude is the winner! That is the one skill to master if you are, or will be, in the job market.

'Claude' mentions increased by 94% in both Tech and Finance. Claude is not only appearing in AI or software roles — it is showing up everywhere: software engineers, product managers, data analysts.

'Prompt engineering', 'Generative AI', 'LLM', 'Gemini' mentions are also on the rise, especially in Tech.

2 — AWS, SQL, Java, Python… are struggling

The absolute loss in these skill mentions is remarkable. Thousands of job postings that mentioned AWS (−3,134), SQL (−3,599), Java (−2,392) and Python (−1,660) are no longer mentioning them. But it's not only them — we are seeing a consistent decline in Azure, GCP (Google Cloud) and JavaScript as well.

It looks like employers are becoming less interested in expertise in these coding, data and cloud technologies — and expecting us to navigate them through AI.

3 — Software and data professions are… changing their forms

At first look, software and data-related roles are decreasing consistently:

But AI engineering and Systems Engineering jobs are increasing steadily — 14% and 6%, respectively.

Which suggests that demand is shifting, not disappearing. The market is rewriting what software and data engineering roles mean.

4 — We have an upcoming skill: Agentic AI

'Agentic AI' mentions increased by 24%! Mostly technical roles are asking for this skill — AI engineers, software engineers, and analytics roles. LangChain mentions, an agentic tool, also increased by 8%. Small in absolute numbers, but enough to prove that employers are demanding more agentic skills and relevant tools.

Even though agentic mentions are growing in tech-heavy roles, I am sure we will see this pattern spread to other roles soon as well. So this is an opportunity for non-tech roles to get ahead of employer demand!

Here is the tool I built to track this data:
emresimdi.com/job-market

Feel free to explore it.
If you find your own insights, please share here with the rest of us!

Data sourced from US job postings via TheirStack, covering Jan–Mar 2026. All monthly figures normalized to 30-day equivalents for fair comparison. Findings reflect job posting requirements, not employment levels.