INWED2022: How Skills Can Help Shape Your Future in Engineering

Today is an exciting day for female engineers! June 23 marks the ninth anniversary of International Women in Engineering Day (INWED). Developed by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES), this annual day of recognition plays a vital role in encouraging more young women to explore the benefits of an engineering career and showing the progress made in the field.nbsp; Women continue to be underrepresented in engineering, with only 23% of those who list software engineer as their title on LinkedIn being a woman. This gender imbalance can lead to missed opportunities for innovation within the industry because having diverse perspectives at the table when we design and build technology is not only important—it can be the difference between a product succeeding or failing. But it all starts with truly being able to understand what is required to succeed in this field to help encourage more women to pursue engineering careers. Along with an educational background and relevant work experience, we’re seeing today that being able to demonstrate the skills that you have and learning the skills that you want is critical, especially as jobs change and you seek work that is more rewarding.nbsp; To help today’s professionals build the skills needed to kickstart or elevate their career, we identified the fastest growing skills for software engineers based on our LinkedIn platform data. And in support of INWED and fostering skills development for women in the engineering field, we’ve unlocked LinkedIn Learning courses on these fastest growing skills, which will be free for the next 30 days: React.js Essential Training: React is one of the most popular libraries for building user interfaces and front-end experiences for web sites. Its applications are scalable and maintainable, making developers more efficient and users more satisfied. React.js serves as the framework for our Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Workbench (DARWIN).nbsp; TypeScript Essential Training:TypeScript is an open-source language by Microsoft that builds on top of the JavaScript language by adding static type definitions. It has become widely adopted in the industry for frontend development. TypeScript is used to power our in-product help systems across the LinkedIn platform, among other use cases.nbsp;nbsp; Spring Boot 2.0 Essential Training: Spring Boot is one of the most efficient and productive ways to build applications using Java for enterprises and cloud native situations. It is a powerful framework that can help you build web applications quickly, using less code.nbsp; In addition to unlocking those LinkedIn courses, we also launched ReturnIn in partnership with WomenBackToWork.org. ReturnIn is a six-month program where individuals looking to reenter the engineering workforce will work in technical roles to build their skill set and gain the experience needed to become full-time engineers. ReturnIn includes programming that provides opportunities and connections to address the network gap caused by career breaks. Returners will develop applications at scale, learn from fellow engineers and managers, and build key skills that can be applied to a future career in engineering. You can learn more about how to apply here. Women today can promote engineering as a career choice for women in the future. At LinkedIn, we believe women can be a driving force on how we reimagine the new world of work and, more importantly, make it possible to create a more inviting, supportive, and inclusive environment for all. #### Methodology: Among our talent pool based on our inferred gender data for LinkedIn members in this talent pool. Less than 1% could be identified as another gender identity, so we have shown gender composition using only male and female data points from April 2021 to April 2022. Methodology: Fastest growing skills amongst software engineers on LinkedIn between April 2021 and April 2022.nbsp; nbsp;