How can JavaScript increase your job opportunities?

For almost a decade now, JavaScript is spoken of as one of the most demanded programming languages on the market. That is mostly because of its wide and growing range of usability and possibilities for developers who embrace its dynamic nature and learn it.

History

For the first few years after the creation of the web (1990s), websites were purely static. There was no option for any dynamic content after the page loaded. However, in the then growing web scene, there was a great need to remove that restriction. Shortly afterwards, Brendan Eich and his team of engineers from Netscape created the first version of a new programming language for browsers in just 10 days. Its first name was LiveScipt, and shortly afterwards it was changed to JavaScript, in order to take advantage of the popularity of the then already known Java programming language, although the two programming languages had nothing in common.

One would think that a company that created such programming language like JavaScript is at the very top of IT today, but the reality is completely different. Namely, after losing “browser war” to a much bigger player in the IT world at the time — Microsoft, the decline of the Netscape company began in 1999, so that today this company does not exist at all. This tells us a lot about the dynamism of the IT industry, and how companies take turns at the top. The situation is similar with technologies: new, more advanced tools are constantly being developed, so we must always be ready to learn new things.

However, the product that Netscape created, JavaScript, is now used on more than 95% of websites in the world. Not only that, JavaScript is used for developing programs for many other platforms, which we will cover in details little bit later.

Numbers

For the last 7 years in a row, JavaScript has been the most popular programming language chosen in the Stack Overflow Developer survey. On job search and offer sites, JavaScript ads account for 15–30% of all IT jobs, depending on the region, which is a large number if we take into account how many technologies and tools exist on the market now.