Hottest skills that can get you hired

At the beginning of the New Year, many professionals would be contemplating about a job change. Or even a new career. But what skills are employers looking for?

Professional networking website LinkedIn collated the hottest skills that helped people land better jobs in 2015. Sohan Murthy, data analytics and strategy researcher at LinkedIn, in a blog post said, "We noticed that companies were still recruiting and hiring for these skills well into the final months of 2015, so we expect these skills will remain in demand in the early part of 2016."

"This means if you have one or more of these skills, you're likely to continue getting interest from recruiters in the New Year." LinkedIn came out with a list of 'Hottest Skills of 2015' based on hiring and recruiting activity seen on the networking website in the past year (January 1 to December 1, 2015). As expected, IT skills dominated the list.

Murthy said that in many ways, 2015 could be seen as the year cloud and distributed computing graduated from a niche skill set to a more prominent skill set in the global workforce. It was an advanced category in a few countries last year, according to LinkedIn. Skills related to statistical analysis and data mining featured at number 2 in the list.

According to LinkedIn, it was the only skill category that consistently ranked in the top 4 across all of the countries analysed. "We still live in an increasingly data-driven world, and businesses are still aggressively hiring experts in data storage, retrieval and analysis," Murthy added.

However, demand for some skills cooled off. According to LinkedIn, "Game development dropped from 24th to 29th, digital and online marketing dropped from 16th to 32nd, SAP ERP systems dropped from 21st to 34th, computer graphics and animation dropped from 17th to 37th, and integrated circuit design dropped from 22nd to 41st." Employers are still looking for these skills.