Some languages are better than others at preventing graduate programmers from adopting bad habits – C# and Java, for example. But Lavenne says he discourages developers from using other languages entirely. "I don't want an engineer writing in C or C++, and the reason is it's too dangerous of a language," he explains.

"There are so many potential errors they can create that modern languages like C#, TypeScript, Java, Python can prevent…We don't want them writing in those languages at all." //

Hands-on experience will always be a deciding factor – though Lavenne acknowledges that the majority of students will be lacking this by default. Instead, he suggests university courses and coding programs encourage as much project work as possible – which will at least equip them with a working knowledge of the various components of the software development cycle.

There are also a handful of specific tools and technologies that Lavenne feels that every aspiring developer should have under their belt.

"Putting an emphasis on JavaScript and TypeScript is important; Node.js is a moving force of the world right now in web technologies and others. People have to start learning TypeScript in school," he says. //

On the skillsets for languages that are super marketable; the technologies that are very marketable today are web and APIs. Every single software engineer that will come out on the market will work with APIs – they have to speak APIs, they have to speak JSON. XML is fading out into the distance; the world is speaking JSON from computer to computer, and REST APIs are everything."

Today, any application being built is going to be distributed and on the cloud. This means that deep and specific knowledge of cloud platforms is going to put a developer in good stead with potential employers.