Front-end developer skillset chart
During the past year of studying Multimedia Design and Communication, I got extremely interested in front-end development technologies and workflow. I was learning and practicing a lot of HTML, CSS and JavaScript (well, more of jQuery, to be honest), which resulted in quite a few bigger school projects where I mainly took a role of front-end developer (in addition to project guiding, team management and UX design). As I was progressing with these technologies, I got essentially interested and curious about the real job market requirements for front-end developers, and therefore started looking at real job advertisements from time to time. I was happy seeing many things I have been learning were closely relevant to the field of development, but there is, of course, a space to improve.
My tiny research of skill requirements
I found many forum posts where people are asking about the necessary skill-set of front-end developer so I decided to make my own research. I browsed 20 most recent job advertisements for front-end developers by writing out the skills required for the position. I then assembled the results into a spreadsheet (below), filling the cells with an appropriate skill that is being required (“excellence”, “strong understanding”, “basic knowledge”, etc.). I then combined some of those words together, to make calculating results easier, and gave each skill a rating of 1 to 5 points (ranging from “is a plus” to “ninja” skill requirements). The resulting scores were summed up at the end, therefore I was able to arrange the required skills by importance. Here is how I converted words into score (this might be a tad subjective, for some of them are difficult to evaluate, but they still serve a purpose):
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1 – “is a plus”, “is a bonus”, “preferred”.
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2 – “basic”, “know”, “knowledge”, “know how”, “familiar with”, “understanding of”, “good sense”. “good sense”, “introduced to”, “have an eye”, “comfortable”.
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3 – “experience in”, “ability to”, “required (for no specified level of skill)”, “working knowledge”, “good”, “excellent eye”. “confident”.
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4 – “proven experience”, “strong”, “proficient”, “solid/excellent understanding”, “very strong”.
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5 – “ninja”, “professional experience”, “expertise”, “expert”, “excellence”, “exceptional”, “extremely strong”, “is a must”.
The Results
Let’s take a look at the spreadsheet of employer requirements for front-end developer position, that I made on gdocs.
The results weren’t surprising, but there were definitely things present, which I will eventually have to master in order to get into the field. And since most ads state 3+ years of experience as a requirement, this gives me some time to learn 
Top 5
Here we have it – the top five skills/technologies required for front-end developers (and their overall scores):
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HTML/HTML5 (87)
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CSS/CSS3 (87)
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Javascript (73)
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Communication skills (46)
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jquery framework (45)
Perhaps the most surprising thing for me was the importance of social/communication skills (46 points), coming into 4th place. It suggests that current development workflow is closely tied to other departments, which nowadays probably goes in conjunction with agile development. My suggestion – either acquire a significant amount of social skills, or, perhaps, try back-end development or programming.
Other technical skills
Since responsive design is getting more and more popular, it is now a common requirement to learn to build responsive websites, cross browser development (although mainly IE8+), we should also have an understanding in design principles, which probably is related to coding flexible responsive designs, and we, as developers need to judge positioning of the things without annoying the designer every 5 minutes.
Couple of agencies still require at least an understanding of Flash, mainly for creating banners. Some of them focus on a “handcrafted code” or “code from scratch”, which is quite optimistic, considering all the frameworks laying around.
Although I learned quite a lot of PHP, created and queried MySQL databases during my studies, I can see that PHP and MySQL combined received only 22 points, which, I would say, suggests that you should have a good understanding of how back-end works so you could communicate with programmers.
Learning CSS preprocessors, some version control, AJAX, and a CMS (SASS, Git, WordPress comes to mind), would definitely improve the chances to find a job.
Personal qualities
In addition to technical skills, personal skills are also very important. Since no one expects someone to be lazy or have a lack of self-confidence, you have to have good time management skills (for those awaited deadlines), be able to work in a team or independently, have good problem solving skills, be oriented to detail and sometimes focus on multiple projects at a time.
Sum up
I suppose one of the most important things one could take from this tiny and totally unrepresentative research is how if you master html, css and javascript, you are basically 80% at your new office door. On the other hand, since It takes 20% of time to do 80% of the job and 80% of time to do the rest, knowing only html/css/javascript won’t get you too far. The learning never stops, right?
Explore my spreadsheet if you like, and leave a comment if you spot any inconsistencies. Or just to say hi :)
