Why the Demand for Blockchain Developers is ‘through the roof’?

• Toshendra Kumar Sharma
• November 27, 2019

Ever since the huge bull wave of December 2017, interest in Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have been soaring. Blockchain is an emerging technology, and there aren’t enough qualified Blockchain developers that can be hired. That has led to a significant demand and supply gap of blockchain skills. Blockchain developers have become very valuable in the job market, with jobs ranging from $150,000 to $250,000. According to job search platform, Hired, there has been a 517% increase in demand for software engineers having knowledge in blockchain development, in the past year.

Hired ranked blockchain development skills listed in the top three job openings in globally after Blockchain engineers came security engineers and embedded engineers, which saw 132% and 76% growth respectively.

Mehul Patel, the CEO of Hired, said that the growth in demand for blockchain certified professional has gone “through the roof.” 

“It’s staggering growth,” Patel said.

Hired extracted its data from the resumes of more than 100,000 job seekers and job postings from around 10,000 companies that use the website.

Software developers with blockchain skills also receive a high salary as $157,000 in the U.S., according to the report. According to Hired’s story, In London, software engineers having blockchain development skills earn around $90,000; in Toronto, they earn about $75,000; and in Paris, $67,000.

Other recent job reports also support Hired’s data. For example, In December job market research firm Burning Glass Technologies reported that blockchain developer job openings had risen 316% in the past year. It has created 12,006 job openings in the U.S. alone.

 

“As demand increases, so do salaries,” according to the Hired report.

In December, LinkedIn stated its top five emerging careers and reveled that the blockchain developer was at the top.

Although blockchain engineering is the top in-demand skill on the Hired marketplace, only 12% of survey respondents identified blockchain as the high technology they want to learn. Fifty-one percent of the respondents said Python is their most-liked languages, while 49% said Javascript and PHP were ranked last at 19%.

Another huge problem leading to the mismatch between the supply and demand of blockchain developers is the difficulty in finding platforms that offer good training on Blockchain, Patel said. According to Hired data, one in every five software engineers is self-taught.

“I think generally we are seeing less than half of engineers we looked at had a B.S. degree and one-fifth of them had gone through a year and a half of school. So one-third of our engineering base is self-taught or taught through non-traditional means,” Patel said.

As two-thirds of the software engineering roles listed on Hired’s platform did not have blockchain word in the title, it but listed blockchain as a skill. “So, I think the title itself is not out there yet, but folks are looking for the skills,” Patel said.

 

Conclusion

Currently, the only feasible way to become proficient is to learn on your own or join programs organized by blockchain experts and industry groups, such as Blockchain Council and Udemy. For more details on Blockchain Courses visit Blockchain Council.