Pluralsight Tech Learning Pulse: The trending skills for tech teams in 2026

As a leader, it can be difficult to know what to upskill your tech teams in. Do you chase that trending new tool or service you heard about, or is it just a distracting fad? If you do nothing, you risk the skills of your tech teams stagnating, with professionals delivering projects as if it’s 2020 instead of 2026. And so you ask yourself:

“I wish I knew how everyone else was upskilling their tech teams.”

Pluralsight’s Tech Learning Pulse is here to help with just that, providing you with a global analysis of what tech teams and professionals are studying right now. Our report is based on the learning trends of over 3.6 million tech professionals and their teams worldwide, tracking activity from 2024 to 2026. Keep reading to find out what we discovered.

1. For the last two years, cloud computing has been the top area of upskilling for tech teams

No matter what business region you’re in — NA, APAC, EMEA, or LATAM — cloud learning tops the charts. Overall, it makes up a quarter (25%) of all tech upskilling activity. Even in the USA, where vast amounts of resources are being poured into the AI industry, cloud computing still made up a greater share of tech upskilling than AI (25% vs 20%).

Regionally, learning cloud computing has been the most popular in EMEA and LATAM, and has been a particular focus for businesses and professionals in Australia (42%), the Philippines (38%), Germany (38%), and Canada (33%).

Our findings discovered there was only one country where cloud computing is not the top tech upskilling priority: Singapore. In the Lion City, AI currently makes up the lion’s share of all tech learning (39%) followed closely by software development (33%). Meanwhile, cloud computing takes a backseat (14%) compared to the global average.

Why the strong interest in cloud computing?

Cloud computing is foundational for running a modern business. It’s also required to deliver on AI projects, since these are built on cloud foundations. According to NTT Data research, 50% of CIO and CTOs said the rise of AI has enhanced their need for investment in the cloud. 

The spike in cloud interest in EMEA is also not surprising. According to Gartner research, 61% of European CIOs and tech leaders stated they want to spend more on local cloud for geopolitical reasons and shift away from using US-based hyperscalers. 

What specific cloud skills are tech teams training in?

1. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud (In that order)

Studying AWS and Azure is particularly popular, with a sizable gap between these two providers and Google Cloud (the other member of the cloud “Big Three”). When it came to tech teams searching for things to learn across all technologies, AWS ranked third, followed by Azure at fifth and Google Cloud at twenty fourth.

2. Foundational and mid-level cloud certifications

The most popular areas of study were foundational and mid-level cloud certifications, such as AWS’s AIF-C01, CLF-C02, and SAA-C03, and Microsoft’s AZ-900. A likely cause is that these certificates act as a springboard for professionals tackling more specialized cloud certifications. Another is that having most tech teams gain baseline cloud certification is a great way to drive broader organizational cloud maturity, which in turn drives cloud ROI.

3. Kubernetes, Terraform, and Docker

All of these are important cloud-adjacent technologies. This fits in with what we’ve seen in the industry, where managing increasingly complex cloud environments — particularly hybrid and multicloud arrangements — is becoming a prized skill set. 

4. Network concepts and protocols

Cloud is strongly tied to network concepts and protocols, to the point it’s impossible to architect without understanding these things. As such, it’s no surprise this is a popular area of study.

Is your cloud investment actually delivering a return? Take Pluralsight’s free Cloud Maturity Assessment to see how well you’re transforming cloud investments into results.

2. Even though teams spent more time studying cloud in 2026, AI learning continues to climb

While tech teams spent less time studying cloud computing than AI over the last twelve months, there’s another likely cause of this: the depth of knowledge required. While many organizations are rushing to upskill their entire workforce to have foundational AI skills, most professionals don’t need to have deep AI knowledge (unless they’re directly working with AI models, or are part of an engineering team). 

The end result? AI learning can wrap up a lot quicker than cloud learning*, because in the time it takes for someone to study prompt engineering or how to use an agentic tool, the other person is still trying to memorize most of AWS’s 200+ cloud services, including the major features and use cases.

Since 2025, there has been a notable increase in the number of learners searching for courses on AI topics such as Generative AI (109%), Agentic AI (327%), MCP (279%), and Machine Learning (599%).

(* If you’re building an AI-ready engineering team, this is a significantly different story, as they now need to have deep knowledge of agentic coding tools, token management, troubleshooting common API or SDK issues, building safeguards, and a lot more.)

Globally, more tech teams are spending time upskilling in AI

There’s a sizable divide between countries where tech teams are spending a lot of time upskilling in AI and those that aren’t. For example:

• AI makes up a sizable portion of tech upskilling in Singapore (39%), the US (22%), India (21%), and Poland (20%).

• Conversely, countries where AI is less of a focus are France (14%), Germany (14%), Australia (13%), the Philippines (13%), Mexico (12%), and the UK (12%).

Notably, even in the countries listed above where AI is less of a focus, there was still a year-on-year increase in AI upskilling (except for France, where it remained flat).

What specific AI skills are tech teams training in?

1. Claude / Claude Code and GitHub Copilot

Claude is the most popular AI tool to learn in 2026, and it’s not even close. Interest in Claude among tech learners has increased more than 23 times since 2025. It’s twice as popular as its nearest competitor, GitHub Copilot, and eight times more popular than Cursor. This reflects the strong popularity that Claude Code currently enjoys among engineering teams.

2. Agentic AI, multi-agent systems, and MCP

Agentic AI has been one of the most popular topics to study in 2026, likely driven by a rise in agentic AI-assisted tools like Claude Code. Engineers in particular are being tasked with structuring agentic AI systems, particularly multi-agent systems, to perform tasks across the entire software development lifecycle. MCP is currently a popular framework for designing multi-agent systems.

To learn more about MCP, I’d strongly recommend reading Steve Buchanan’s Behind The Buzzword: “What is MCP?”, or for a deeper technical dive, Axel Sirota’s “Multi-agent systems with MCP: Building AI teams that share tools.”  Pluralsight also has a dedicated learning path entirely on MCP.

3. Prompt engineering

While this may bring back memories of AI pundits in 2024 saying all our jobs are going to become obsolete and everyone will be rehired as “Prompt Engineers,” it seems that tech teams are still investing a lot of time in mastering this foundational skill.

Learners searching for courses on prompt engineering nearly doubled this year (184%). Meanwhile, hands-on labs on prompt engineering remain our two most popular, and foundational prompt engineering was our second-most popular video course among tech teams. 

4. Engineer-specific Generative AI learning

As mentioned earlier, engineers need to specialize in a wide range of tasks to successfully adopt AI into their workflows. Our Agentic AI for Developers course has been incredibly popular in 2026, reflecting a spike of interest among tech teams in learning the particulars of these tools.

5. LangChain and LangGraph

If you’re after deep, professional control over your AI agents, LangChain and LangGraph still address this need. Tech teams frequently search for both of these topics, with interest in LangChain rising by 37% and LangGraph by 288% in 2026.

6. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

Interest in learning RAG has doubled since 2025 and still ranks among the top 100 searched-for learning topics overall. While it’s stopped dominating news headlines as the hot new AI topic to learn, AI models still need ways to perform external knowledge retrieval, and so tech teams are still upskilling in it behind the scenes.

3. Traditional software development is still a hot area of study, despite AI being in the mix

Upskilling in development is still the third most popular field among tech teams globally (software development makes up 17% of upskilling activity, ranking behind cloud and AI). However, the fields of study here are increasingly becoming intermingled with AI as it becomes part of the DNA of software development — for example, studying Claude Code or GitHub Copilot. 

That’s not to say that practitioners aren’t still studying popular non-AI programming languages, frameworks, and tools, as this is still the case. There’s also been an increase in learning activities for many of these, showing that AI hasn’t replaced the need to have engineering know-how.

In terms of countries where upskilling in development is notably more or less popular than other topics:

• More popular: The Philippines (38%), Singapore (33%),  France (22%), Mexico (22%), Netherlands (20%), Poland (20%), Spain (21%), India (19%), Germany (18%).
  

• Less popular: UK (15%), US (14%), Canada (13%), Australia (11%), 

What specific AI skills are tech teams training in?

1. Python

The number of tech professionals seeking Python learning materials jumped by 22% this year, with it ranking 4th overall in learning search terms. That’s no surprise if you’ve been in the industry for a while, since Python always tops industry lists for the most popular programming language. It’s also got the most popular data science and ML libraries like PyTorch, NumPy,  and Pandas.

2. React (but AI likes it far more)

React is everywhere in front-end development, acting as the backbone of modern web and mobile interfaces. It ranks sixteenth among all learning search terms. While that might not sound high, that list includes everything you can think about people wanting to learn in tech, including cybersecurity, data, and IT ops. 

According to NPM trends, the number of installation downloads for React has skyrocketed from an average of 40 million downloads per week in 2025 to 153 million in 2026. That’s nearly quadruple the number of installations! And yet, we’ve seen only a tiny year-on-year spike in learning React (4% growth since 2025).

At first, that doesn’t add up — until you take into account two things. The first is that 2026 is the year that Agentic AI really became mainstream in development workflows. The second is that AI really loves React, and will often default to it over frameworks like Svelte, Solid, Blazor, Angular, or Vue.

That creates a feedback loop, where more sites are made with React. The next generation of AI then trains on these, and decides that because React is the most commonly used, it’s the best approach (even if it’s actually not the best framework to use for the scenario in question.)

This warrants a public service announcement: If you’ve got front end developers, have them learn not just about React, but other frameworks as well. With their knowledge, they can guide the AI to choose the best solution for any given scenario, rather than default to a common approach that might create more work and less value for your business.

3. Everything Git: Git, GitHub, GitHub Copilot, GitHub Actions, and GitLab

The number of learners searching for Git-related learning materials jumped notably this year: Git by 39%, GitHub by 82%, GitHub Actions by 64%, and GitLab by 39%. GitHub Copilot was the most popular of all of these, ranking as the 14th most searched-for topic, doubling in popularity (206%) since 2025.

4. Angular

For those not familiar, Angular is a full-featured, front-end framework for building web application frameworks. It’s more complete and opinionated than React, which is more of a lightweight UI library. 

In 2026, Angular was the twenty-second most-searched-for thing to learn about in tech overall, with its popularity creeping up a modest 11%. For full disclosure, Angular actually took a larger hit in learner popularity in 2025 when it dropped by -26%. Even so, this framework still ranks in the top 25 topics overall, and above others like Vue, Svelte, and Blazor.

5. The other popular languages besides Python: Java, C#, JavaScript, and TypeScript (in that order)

As mentioned earlier, learning programming languages has not gone anywhere in 2026, with a jump of interest in Java (6%), C# (15%) and Typescript (23%). While interest in JavaScript outpaced Typescript and other languages worth mentioning, it remained unchanged from 2025.

6. Test-driven development, quality engineering, and API design and development

All of these were of strong interest among tech teams in 2026. There’s strong reason to believe the spike in interest for these topics is driven by mainstream AI adoption in the SDLC:

• Test-Driven Development (TDD): One of the biggest pain points with TDD is writing all your unit tests before you write any code, and with the rise of AI agents who can produce these in seconds, many developers are finding TDD easier to actually adopt in practice. 

• Quality Engineering (QE): Quality engineering is about proactively preventing defects instead of reactively detecting them. AI in engineering can create velocity but can potentially impact things like code quality and system reliability, increasing the demand for quality control.

• API design and development: While AI models can technically exist without APIs, they can’t be practically applied without them — they need to be able to interact with users, systems, and data to be useful. With a 37% spike of interest in learning APIs in 2026, AI is the most likely smoking bullet.

4. Security, IT Ops, Product, and Data were smaller upskilling focus areas 2026

Globally, AI, Cloud, and Software Development made up the majority (62%) of all tech upskilling activity. But what about the popularity of other domains? In order of popularity, IT operations ranked 4th (11%), followed by Product and Business topics (10%), Data (8%), Security (7%), Digital Transformation (1%) and Other Topics (1%).

In our data, Security was the most surprising. Last November, we predicted many of the trends above as part of Pluralsight’s 2026 Tech Forecast report. However, one that didn’t come to pass was a spike in cybersecurity upskilling, driven largely by the growing use of AI by threat actors and increased demands on security teams.

It’s worth noting that the above trends vary considerably by country. Some more granular insights:

• In Australia, upskilling in IT operations (13%) dwarfs software development (11%), with data being a far lower priority (4%).

• In the UK, upskilling in security is double the global average (13%), outranking AI (12%). There’s also a greater focus on IT operations (13%). 

• In India, upskilling in data is significantly higher than the global average (11%) while security is lower (5%).

• In Mexico, upskilling in product and business topics (15%) is more popular than learning AI (12%).

• In the Netherlands, learning IT Ops is practically tied with interest in AI (both 14%). The same is true in the Philippines with Data and AI (tied at 13%).

• In Singapore, learning security is significantly less popular (2%) than AI and Software Development (which combined make up 74% of all upskilling.)

• In the US and Canada, security is a greater focus for upskilling than in many other countries (8%) — though still below subjects like AI, cloud, software development, and IT ops.

Conclusion

In 2026, it’s clear that AI has sharply redefined upskilling priorities in tech teams across the globe. And yet, core skill sets such as cloud computing and software development remain as in-demand as ever. And while topics such as IT ops, data, and security haven’t received the same level of upskilling attention this year, these are still areas which are critical for achieving business objectives, not simply a source of operational overhead.

As with every year, one thing always remains the same: the shifting demands on tech teams, and with it, the need for continuous upskilling to keep them current and delivering.

Methodology

This analysis is based on Pluralsight platform usage data from 2024 to 2026. This includes anonymized data on the number of users and uses of educational content (such as educational videos, hands-on labs, and skill assessments), domains of engagement, and the number of learners who have made search queries into the platform. Year-over-year comparisons were weighted by share of total searches to compensate for any fluctuations in annual user numbers.