Have you ever wondered about the most popular skills that marketing industry recruiters are looking from professionals to fill their vacancies this year?

Well, if you are a UAE-based professional in SEO (search engine optimisation) marketing, PR (public relations) and communications, writing and publishing, social media or digital and online marketing, then your employment prospects in 2016 are very promising indeed, according to LinkedIn.

Because according to data supplied exclusively to the author of this column by the professional network, your talent and experience are prominently positioned in a shortlist of the 25 most coveted skills among recruiters from all industries in the UAE.

This may not come as a surprise because a recent study by global inbound marketing specialist HubSpot says 69 per cent of B2C — and 70 per cent of marketers worldwide — will produce more content this year than they did in 2015.

The list is the result of extensive research conducted by LinkedIn based on an analysis of all hiring and recruiting activity that occurred on the online platform in 2015. According to the findings, PR and communications and writing and publishing skills showed a significant increase of five spots or more in terms of recruiter demand.

In fact, PR and communications skills ranked as the 14th most popular in the annual list, behind SEO marketing, which as the sector’s most sought after skill, was in fourth position and the same as in 2014.

Despite the continuous rise of digital, LinkedIn-led recruitment for social media professionals showed a drop of three places as the 20th most popular skill set in the 2015 list, two places above digital and online marketing, which at 22nd retreated by four places, in a downwards spiral trend for both social and digital in terms of demand.

Employers are still looking for these skills strongly compared to a multitude of other skills that don’t even feature in the list — but just not as much as last year.

The UAE is one of the 10 markets LinkedIn uses as its benchmark for this annual study, together with Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Holland, South Africa, the UK and the US.

When comparing the findings with the global average, the only constant with the UAE is SEO marketing, which also ranks in fourth place of the list with the 25 hottest skills on LinkedIn in 2015. None of the other marketing industry skills popular in the UAE is present in the global list, which however features ‘marketing campaign management’ in third place with a meteoric jump of nine places compared to the previous year.

The global list is rich with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) tech-related skills such as cloud computing in first place, as the erstwhile niche graduates to more prominence. Statistical analysis and data mining — which sits in second place in the global list — continues to reign as the only skill category consistently ranked in the top four across all countries analysed. In fact, in the UAE, it occupies the top spot in the list of the hottest skills.

This trend signifies that the UAE continues to be an increasingly data-driven country, where businesses are still aggressively hiring experts in data storage, retrieval and analysis. It also suggests that Big Data is here to stay and eventually shape the things to come by ushering us to a new age that will bring rise to the technical marketer.

In fact as early as in 2012, a Gartner report had predicted that by 2017 ‘chief marketing officers’ would be spending more on technology than their ‘chief information officer’ colleagues.

With digital, online and SEO marketing skills well entrenched in the UAE’s list of this year’s hottest professional skills, there is strong evidence that this prediction may not be light years away from its fulfilment.

The writer is Head of PR and Social Media at Al-Futtaim and author of ‘Back to the Future of Marketing — PRovolve or Perish’. Follow him on Twitter @georgekotsolios.