Which IT skills will be most in demand in the first quarter of 2024?

The tech industry courses people take online can tell us a lot about which IT skills are in demand and what career paths look like today.

Udemy is an online learning platform that collects quarterly data on which courses on its platform are the most popular. We learned about technology and IT skills from their Q1 2024 report. Explore these in-demand IT skills to help you choose the next step in your technology career.

Top 10 emerging technology skills in the world

The top ten global emerging technology skills topics visited on Udemy are:

• Informatica PowerCenter.
• Microsoft Playwright.
• 1Z0-071: Oracle Database SQL Certified Associate certification.
• CompTIA Security+ certified.
• DP-203: Microsoft Azure Data Engineer Associate certification.
• SAP FICO.
• Data structure.
• Java algorithms.
• HashiCorp Terraform Associate Certification.
• Selenium network driver.

“Certifications are an extremely powerful currency in the tech world,” Scott Rogers, Udemy’s senior vice president of instructor and content strategy, said in an email to TechRepublic. “They are widely recognized by companies around the world, who increasingly require them. Certification for key technical roles in cloud computing, project management and security.”

According to Rogers, more than 10 million people signed up for IT certification courses on Udemy last year.

See: Self-skilling can make you the right person to fill Australia’s IT talent gap. (Technology Republic)

Technical skills that reflect the tech industry among the top emerging skills appearing on Udemy include:

• Git.
• Oracle SQL.
• C#.
• Amazon AWS and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.
• Python.

“We’re seeing customers leverage Udemy to support certification preparation and help IT professionals significantly increase their chances of passing certification exams,” said Rogers.

English as a Second Language, Sustainability and ChatGPT are also hot topics

One of Udemy’s most popular courses is the TOEIC test, which is the standard for English as a Second Language for Business. Udemy attributes this to multinational businesses that use English as their primary language. Udemy learners are also interested in Spanish, and the language ranks sixth on the list of the top 10 emerging professional skills in the world.

The full list is:

1. TOEIC test.
2. bookkeeping.
3. marketing strategy.
4. supply chain.
5. Business analysis.
6. Spanish.
7. Information security.
8. Deep learning.
9. Generative artificial intelligence.
10. financial analysis.

Courses related to environment, society and governance are very popular. Overall, Udemy’s ESG course consumption increased by 3,128% year-on-year. Only one topic is more popular than ESG: ChatGPT. (Interest in ChatGPT-related courses increased 5,226% in the first quarter of 2023 alone.) ESG-related course topics available on Udemy include corporate sustainability, DEI, and corporate ESG business cases.

Tech skills in high demand, according to LinkedIn, Indeed, CompTIA

Udemy isn’t the only place to look for IT skills courses, and the skills popular on Udemy aren’t the only skills employers are looking for.

LinkedIn ranks artificial intelligence and machine learning as the most in-demand IT skills in 2024, followed by data science and cybersecurity. Indeed found that generative artificial intelligence is the highest-paying field in the industry. The Computing Technology Industry Association ranks the following as the five most in-demand IT skills in 2024:

• AI.
• technical support.
• networking.
• cloud computing.
• Linux.

Technology is a growing and lucrative field

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were nearly 364,000 technology job openings in December 2023. is $104,420 in May 2023.