Know the market

Knowing what you want is great, but is not enough. As the next step, you should research what the market wants from you. The goal is to obtain the perfect cocktail of what you want and what the market offers.

Important note

Developing marketable skills is an important aspect of getting a job in the near future.

First, you must check which Java technologies have been most popular over the last few years and what the future trends look likely to be. Technologies that maintain relatively stable popularity over time are the most used in companies.

Take your time to read several surveys from the last 2-3 years from important websites such as blogs.oracle.com, snyk.io, jaxenter.com, codeburst.io, jetbrains.com, and dzone.com. Primarily, you can search on Google for java technologies survey 2019 or similar combinations of keywords. Also, don’t neglect the financial part, so make sure to search for java salaries survey 2019 as well.

You will find a variety of surveys that nicely summarize the most popular technologies, as you can see in the following two figures. The first one shows the popularity of application servers:

Figure 1.2 – The application servers that are used

The following figure shows which frameworks developers prefer:

Figure 1.3 – The frameworks that developers prefer to use

While reading, make a list and note down what Java technologies are the most popular and what technologies don’t deserve your attention at this moment. It will be a list similar to the following:

Figure 1.4 – Splitting technologies by popularity

This way, you can quickly filter the technologies that are most required by the market. Learning popular technologies maximizes your chances of getting a job in the near future.

Further, take the pulse of the market toward the technologies that you added to the Popular column via the following means:

• Social networks: A significant number of social networks contain posts about technologies and what’s trending in the IT industry. Some major players are LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.
• Bookstores: Book publishers strive to satisfy the interest of the programming community by covering the most popular technologies. They carry out serious research campaigns for filtering the topics that deserve to be covered in their books. A new book or a significant number of books on a certain topic or technology is a good indicator of programming community interest in that topic. Nevertheless, pay attention to technologies that are suddenly going mainstream. Most of the time, such technologies are not adopted by companies immediately. It may take years until they are adopted, or they may remain in the shadows forever.
• Courses and training: Besides colleges and universities, tons of websites strive to provide courses and training for popular and hot topics.