In case you’ve wondered what the hot IT skills will be next year, InformationWeek has already been all over it.

Just last month, the magazine’s website published a list of the top 12 skills for 2020. Listed in reverse order as they were on the website, they are:

12. Help Desk

11. Systems Administration

10. Network Administration

 9. Blockchain

 8. Business Intelligence

 7. DevOps

 6. Development

 5. IoT

 4. Cloud

 3. AI and Machine Learning

 2. Data Specialists

 1. Security

If you said, “Huh? What?” when you saw that Development is an umbrella category and it’s in the middle of the list, you’re not alone. InformationWeek explained things this way:

“Programming skills have long been among the most coveted for employers, and that isn't changing in 2020. Full-stack developers are particularly sought after, as are those who know .NET, Angular, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, ReactJS and React Native, Ruby on Rails, and/or Scala.”

And many of those programming skills are also mentioned in the Internet of Things listing at Number 5.

You can’t really rely on just one list for the real answer to the question of which skills are hot for the upcoming year, though, so we checked out another list, which is presented in numerical order, from ZDNet and TechRepublic:

 1. Computer vision engineer

 2. Machine learning engineer

 3. Network analyst

 4. Security analyst

 5. Cloud engineer

 6. App developer

 7. Business intelligence (BI) analyst

 8. DevOps lead

 9. Database administrator

10. User support specialist

What’s interesting about this list, besides Computer Vision Engineers occupying the top spot (they build and improve computer vision and machine learning algorithms and analytics to detect, classify, and track objects) is that App Developers are near the middle again. And User Support is part of the list.

Even more interesting is that this list was published in December 2017.

The article presenting the list was a “look ahead” to the skills that will be in demand. And it’s really obvious that, with minor exceptions, most of the same skills are in demand year after year. We see variables from time to time in different areas; for example, Pega developers were really hot a couple years ago and now we’re seeing interest in DevOps, particularly with automation engineers.

With the overall unemployment rate under 4% and the tech sector’s rate below 2%, all IT skills are hot.

We always keep an eye out for the hottest of the hot, so stay tuned.