The most in-demand Product & Design skills for 2022
cord data on primary skills and requests assessed to determine the most sought-after data skills for 2022. Taken from the Insights Library on cord.
Anyone with designs on a new job in 2022 will want to know the skills that will most appeal to potential employers. cord analysed which Product & Design skills attracted the most message requests per Engineer, in order to identify those skills that are most in-demand among Product and Design employers.
Engineers considering changing jobs in 2022 can use this data to assess the demand for their skillset and/or decide which skills to learn in order to maximise their chances of success.
Terminology
“Primary skills” refer to the skills that engineers identify as part of their primary skillset when they create their profiles on cord. They can select multiple skills.
“Message requests” are messages sent by companies to engineers, regardless of whether or not the engineer accepts that request.
“Engineer” refers to any jobseeker on cord. For the purposes of this article, “Designer” has been used to refer to any Engineer with a job title that falls in the Product & Design function.
Baseline data
On average, during the six months from which data is drawn, Designers received the following number of message requests on average:
All functions: 2.92
Product & Design: 2.57
Top 5
Figma. Figma was the most sought-after design tool going, with its practitioners receiving more than double the amount of message requests as the average Designer.
Prototyping. With 1.85x as many message requests as the average for Product & Design, Prototyping is an important skill for Designers looking to attract employers’ attention.
Wireframing. Similarly, wireframing stood out to employers looking to speak to Designers. The 84 Designers who listed it as a primary skill shared 383 message requests between them.
User Research. The ability to bring the users’ perspective into product decisions is key in modern software development, so User Research unsurprisingly increased the number of message requests received when listed as a primary skill.
Adobe Creative Suite. While it makes the top 5, observant readers will notice that Designers listing Adobe Creative Suite as a primary skill actually received fewer messages than the average Designer.
Notable mentions
The same applies to a greater extent to the individual components of the Adobe suite, such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. It’s not possible to say with certainty, based on the data assessed here, why listing these as primary skills appears to reduce the number of messages that engineers receive.
Key Insights
- Figma is the most in-demand skill for Designers
- Designers who know Prototyping and Wireframing are significantly more sought-after than the average Designer
- Designers who list the Adobe Creative Suite and its components as primary skills received fewer message requests than the average Designer
- Insights article on cord
Data Disclaimer
Data is based on 1,342 Product Managers, UI Designers, UX Designers, UX Researchers and Graphic Designers who joined cord in the 6 months to 7th January 2022.
