Using Industry Demand to Inform Curriculum Decisions

Higher education institutions are constantly tasked with keeping track of and adapting their instructional materials to changing industry trends in order to best prepare their students for their professional lives beyond university. But while some programs pursue this by maintaining relationships with industry partners, this strategy can create a narrow view of an industry, and limit the scope of curriculum development efforts.

To explore alternative sources of industry intel, Mercyhurst University scholars analyzed LinkUp job listing data – collected daily and directly from more than 60,000 employer websites – to rank technical and non-technical skills according to their demand across job listings. Their results indicate that job listing data lines up with other sources concerning what skills and proficiencies developers report using in their workflows. For example, the top three languages they identified in their research correlate to the top three languages reported in the StackOverflow Developers Survey over the same time periods.