Tech skills pay the bills, but not all tech skills are created equal. Which ones are on the rise, and which get technologists hired and paid? According to data, Kotlin and Kubernetes are worth pursuing if you want to remain employed in the tech industry. These skills were specifically called out in job postings on Dice. Granted, not every job posting lists all skills that the position requires. For example, an ‘Android Developer’ job might not mention Java or Kotlin knowledge as a requirement, as the hiring manager assumes that any applicant will know those skills. However, even if these skills aren't mentioned in the job posting proper, they're likely to become a major element of the job interview, especially if there's a whiteboarding or programming component. Over the last year or so, "hot" skills trends have skewed heavily toward containerization of apps and services, as well as the cloud. Over the first three quarters of 2018, for instance, Kubernetes and Terraform ruled the tech skills landscape. The popularity of these two skills suggests that companies are continuing to invest in designing their own scalable stacks that use cloud services such as AWS or Azure for storage and compute. At the same time, Blockchain, Ethereum, and the catch-all ‘cryptocurrencies’ designation prove that new tech is also gaining traction, despite the wavering price of Bitcoin. Happily, we see blockchain listed more often than crypto; as we've noted before, blockchain is a more viable employment avenue than cryptocurrency. We should also note that, as raw tech skills go, TensorFlow is leading the charge for machine learning. (For those new to TensorFlow, it's an open-source library used to build machine-learning models. It also seems to be contributing to the popularity of Keras; though not as popular as TensorFlow, Keras’ popularity rises and falls in alignment with TensorFlow. GraphQL and Automation Anywhere are proving useful for bringing bots and APIs to more users, too. Then there’s Kotlin. The upstart language is having its moment, with Google’s blessing for Android development leading to a massive uptick in Kotlin jobs. As a tech skill, it’s being called out in job postings more than ever; since Q1 2016, mention of the skill ‘Kotlin’ has seen a 1,000 percent increase. Developers have been using it not only for mobile development, but also (in a more limited way) libraries, tooling, and web backend projects. Over the next several years, it will be interesting to see how the tech-skills landscape changes. One curiosity will be whether Swift can become a more robust presence within job postings. With the language gaining LSP support, it might end up called out more often by employers in a variety of industries – having its 'Kotlin' moment, if you like.