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It's not surprising when you see jobs like Cloud and Distributed Computing' at the top of the list, followed by Statistical Analysis and Data Mining' and Mobile Development' and the list goes on but for those of us in humbler professions, like finance for instance the key to advancement may not be so much what you know, but who you know.

And no, we're not talking about sucking up to the boss.

Increasingly, employers are basing employment decisions on the strength of our networks. It has long been a driver in the sales profession, but in this instance we're not talking so much about size, but about the nature, type and quality of your network.

A recent study How the Social Network Around You Creates Competitive Advantage for Innovation and Top-Line Growth', showed that large open networks where you are the link between people from different clusters is the best predictor of career success.

Associate professor at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce, Rob Cross, agrees: Traditionally, self-help books on networks focus on going out and building big mammoth rolodexes

What we've found is that this isn't what high-performers do. What seems to distinguish the top 20 per cent of performers across a wide-range of organisations is not so much a big network.

The data we've collected point to a different model for networking. The executives who consistently rank in the top 20 per cent of their companies in both performance and well-being have diverse but select networks made up of high-quality relationships with people who come from several different spheres and from up and down the corporate hierarchy, he said.

Sources:

• http://www.businessinsider.com.au/25-skills-that-will-land-you-a-job-2016-1
• https://hbr.org/2011/07/managing-yourself-a-smarter-way-to-network
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-d-simmons/why-being-the-most-connec_b_5564932.html
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelsimmons/2013/12/03/why-being-the-most-connected-is-a-vanity-metric/#4b4b7ce37746