219: I Analyzed 11,000 Data Jobs to See What Skills Actually Get You Hired

[upbeat music] When I was first starting out in data analytics, I felt extremely confused about what skills I should be focusing in.

Honestly, I wasted a lot of hours learning the wrong ones, and I don't want that to happen to you.

Everyone has different opinions on what they think are the right skills, but what does the data actually say? So I analyzed 11,060 real data job postings to find out what skills are actually most in demand and which ones are just a waste of your time.

And yes, I did a similar analysis about a year and a half ago, and about 110,000 of you guys turned in, so thank you so much for supporting me.

But a lot has changed since then, so I figured it was time for an update.

The first of which is that many of you told me that I was too slow to actually get to the point, and thank you, I listened, so here is the data.

So let's go ahead and start with last year's numbers because it's important to set a baseline to see how things have changed in 2026.

So in the spring of 2025, I analyzed almost 3,000 different data analyst jobs, and here's what the ranking looked like.

We had Excel on top at 39%, SQL in second place at 31%, Tableau in third place at 21%, Python in fourth at 14%, and then finally Power BI in fifth at 13%, and R at the bottom at 8%.

And this is the amount of times those skills or tools were listed in all of the job descriptions.

Now, let's look at how these numbers have changed since then, starting with R.

So last year, R was at 8%, and this year, it's actually halved to 4%.