[OC] LLM Evaluation is the fastest-growing data skill of 2026 — by a wide margin. Data & Analytics postings overall up 58% YoY across 6 countries

We've been tracking job postings across six markets: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the UK, and the US, indexed to Jan 2025 as a baseline.

Two findings stood out:

1. Data & Analytics demand grew 58% YoY, and the growth curve is slightly accelerating rather than flattening. The growth is broad-based across all six markets, not driven by one outlier.

2. LLM Evaluation is pulling away from every other skill. It's growing ~4x faster than the next closest skills on the list (dbt, Snowflake, Causal Inference, Python). This is a skill that barely existed 18 months ago (according to ESCO) now it's showing up in a significant share of senior data postings.

The rest of the fast-growers map cleanly to the "modern data stack" (dbt, Snowflake) and more sophisticated analytics (Causal Inference), with Python as the continuing baseline.

Methodology: Public job boards aggregated across DK, SE, NO, DE, UK, US. Deduplicated by company + title + location. Skills extracted from posting text. Index: Jan = 100. Governmental labour data cross-referenced to validate trends.

Happy to answer methodology questions or share the country-level breakdown.