The skills our clients requisitioned most last quarter
A ranked look at the technology stacks showing up on requisitions right now, what is rising, what is cooling, and what it means if you are hiring.
This is what our clients actually asked for in the first quarter of 2026, ranked by how often a skill was named as a requirement on an open requisition.
The top ten
One note before the table: the shares add up to well over a hundred per cent, because a single requisition names several skills. Read each row as “this appeared on roughly this proportion of requisitions”, not as a slice of a pie.
| # | Skill | Share of reqs | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AWS | 34% | ▲ 3 |
| 2 | Python | 27% | – |
| 3 | Kubernetes | 24% | ▲ 5 |
| 4 | React / TypeScript | 22% | ▼ 2 |
| 5 | Terraform | 19% | ▲ 4 |
| 6 | Java | 17% | ▼ 1 |
| 7 | Snowflake | 14% | ▲ 3 |
| 8 | .NET | 13% | – |
| 9 | Salesforce | 11% | ▲ 1 |
| 10 | Go | 9% | ▲ 2 |
What is rising
Infrastructure as code, sharply. Terraform and Kubernetes both moved up, and more tellingly they increasingly appear on the same requisition. Teams are no longer hiring a cloud engineer and a platform engineer as separate ideas; they are hiring one person expected to own the pipeline from module to cluster. That consolidation is good for candidates who have both and brutal for those who have one and a passing familiarity with the other.
Data platform work, steadily. Snowflake’s rise is not really about Snowflake. It is about consolidation projects — organisations that ran three analytics stacks deciding to run one — and those projects need engineers who can model and migrate, not only query. dbt appeared alongside it on most of those requisitions.
Security, quietly and expensively. Security did not make the top ten as a named skill because it fragments across IAM, AppSec, GRC and SOC. Taken together it would sit around fourth, and it is consistently the hardest category to fill inside the timeline the client wants.
What is cooling
Front-end without TypeScript. React remains near the top, but a React requisition that does not name TypeScript is now unusual enough to be worth asking about. The requisitions that fell away this quarter were generalist front-end roles at the mid level.
Standalone manual QA. Still requisitioned, but increasingly folded into an automation expectation. A QA role that names Playwright or Cypress fills at roughly normal speed. One that names neither takes noticeably longer, because the candidates who are still purely manual are being priced out of the band the client set.
Unnamed “full-stack”. Requisitions that ask for a full-stack engineer without naming a stack have a materially worse fill rate than every other category we run. They are usually a symptom of the team not having agreed what the person will do, which is a problem no amount of sourcing solves.
What it means if you are hiring
If your requisition sits in the top five, you are competing against a large number of similar requisitions, and speed of process matters more than the size of the band. Losing a week to scheduling costs more than a five per cent rate difference — see why your req has been open for four months for what that looks like in practice.
If your requisition sits outside the top ten, the opposite applies: the market is thin, the search is a mapping exercise rather than a sourcing one, and the realistic timeline is longer than the one you were given. Better to know that at intake than at week eleven.
The figures above are indicative market ranges compiled for this draft. Replace them with your own placement data — and state the number of requisitions behind the ranking — before publishing.