Schools across the nation are trying to reduce chronic absentee levels. A recent study from The GRAD Partnership, Everyone Graduates Center and the Partnership for Student Success, finds that small and rural districts are recovering attendance rates faster than larger, more urban and suburban districts. 

The study reported that rural districts with fewer than 1,000 students brought their chronic absenteeism back to within 2% of their pre-pandemic baseline by the 2024-25 school year at about twice the rate as urban districts with more than 50,000 students. 

While some small and rural districts have bounced back, many districts across the country still have a long way to go to get back to pre-pandemic attendance rates. EdSurge talked with a deputy superintendent, a director of attendance and student supports, and an instructional coach at different districts nationwide to understand how they tackle the issue.

The researchers couldn’t find a clear reason as to why small and rural districts have bounced back quicker. California and Iowa accounted for over 30% of the small and rural districts that bounced back, despite taking two different approaches.

California opted for a larger scale approach, changing its absenteeism and truancy laws and investing more funding in schools’ pandemic recovery statewide. On the other hand, Iowa took the more granular path, offering technical assistance and templates to districts and using data to identify needs and increase attendance.

Finding the connection among the standout bounce-back states and districts is the next central research question, according to the study, which looked at 8,586 school districts across 34 states and the District of Columbia. 

A Proactive Approach

At Earlville Community Unit School District 9 in Illinois, School Social Worker Michele Fahrlander uses a proactive program to ensure attendance. 

“Because we are a smaller district, we are able to take a more individualized approach,” she says. That means family outreach centers on early intervention and consistent communication.

“We try not to wait until attendance becomes a major concern before reaching out. When we start noticing a pattern of absences or a decline in attendance, we make contact to try to better understand what might be contributing to the student’s absences and how we can support both the student and the family,” she says.

The program helped increase district-wide attendance from 62% in 2022 to 88% in 2026, with high school attendance climbing from 61% to 90%.

“We use several different methods of communication depending on what works best for each family. This might include phone calls, texts, emails, letters, or meetings,” she says. “The frequency of contact really depends on the individual student and their needs.”

For some, a single conversation and some additional support may be enough. For students with more significant or ongoing attendance concerns, “we increase communication and may have regular check-ins with students, attendance meetings, or develop an individualized attendance plan or contract,” she says.

Should a student’s absences increase, “families receive attendance letters at specific thresholds, including after five and 10 days of absence,” she says. “The 10-day letter also communicates the additional documentation requirements for future absences.”

Along with this general approach, “we also focus on creating positive motivation for students to want to attend school,” she said. At the junior high level, for example, Earlville Community Unit School District 9 offers the Not Being Absent (NBA) Attendance Incentive Program. “Students earn points for attendance as part of their homeroom team, which creates some friendly competition and gives students recognition for being at school,” Fahrlander says.

At the high school level, there are quarterly attendance incentive field trips for students who meet the attendance expectations.

“Overall, our goal is to combine positive motivation for all students with more individualized support for students who are at greater risk,” she says. “In a small, rural district, it is often easier to notice when a student starts to struggle with attendance because our staff know the students and families well. A student is not just a name or number on an attendance report.”

Reframe the Messaging

At Moline Coal Valley School District in Illinois, a small district serving about 7,300 students across 15 schools, Deputy Superintendent Brian Prybil focuses on the content of the outreach. He encourages a positive tone, with an eye toward building trust.

“For example, I had one principal who intentionally worked on making personal phone calls to the parents,” he says.

The calls were never scolding. “It was, ‘Hey, hope everything’s going OK. This is what Billy missed today,’ instead of building a punitive type message,” says Prybil, who is also the co-author of “Sixth Essential: A Playbook For School Leaders.”

There are many reasons for absenteeism, some of which schools can help families to address. With that in mind, Prybil says a key message in those calls is, “If you need anything, let us know.” 

Teachers can support that effort. “The number one thing for teachers is to build trust with their students,” he says. “Not every day is going to be perfect. But we can invest in getting to know our students and letting them know that we’re all in this together.”

In high school in particular, “it’s really easy to blame kids” for not showing up, he says. But as long as they are present, teachers can “try to be positive with them, try to build that relationship and accomplish what you can accomplish with the time you have with them.”

Automated Routines

Automating the logistics around attendance frees staff to focus on those human conversations.

Chris Miller serves as director of attendance and student support at the North Central Ohio Educational Service, which supports schools in multiple rural districts. Previously, as an assistant principal at a high school, he was in charge of attendance, and it was a logistical nightmare.

“It was difficult to keep up,” he says. “Every day, kids are missing, and your report that you run on Monday, on Tuesday is outdated already. And we’ve got to do it again and again and again.” When manual tracking proved ineffective, he built an app, Attendance K12.

With help from technology, “we’ve curbed the time on figuring out the who, and now we can spend people’s time discussing with families about the why,” he says. “That’s where the rural districts really have an advantage, because those conversations often fall on the ears of people who are familiar with [school staff].”

Teachers play a key role: Technology can help to track and manage absenteeism, but educators are the front line of remediation.

Rather than just focusing on missed work when a kid returns to class, teachers should be focused on “creating an environment that is welcoming when they return,” he says. “By creating that space that feels comfortable, it eliminates some of that return-to-school anxiety that sometimes builds when they start stacking absences.”

Coordinating a Strategic Effort

At Stanfield Elementary School in rural North Carolina, instructional coach Jessica Dunn approaches attendance response as a coordinated endeavor.

Rather than one person handling it alone, “we’re involving administration, the counselor, the social worker,” she says, with those efforts based on timely reports from a data manager. “We do it as a team, truthfully.”

When the team goes into action, it focuses on addressing the factors that cause absenteeism in the first place. For example, the team sends home bags of food that a church partner provides. “That alleviates that stress for them, and our counselor does a great job of getting those bags out,” she says. With one less thing to worry about, “they can focus on getting the kids here.”

While attendance is always hard to manage, Dunn believes the nature of a rural community makes all this a little easier. Teachers, counselors, and administrators “know everybody, they can connect to them,” she says. In a rural community, or a small school, keeping attendance up “is all about support, connection, and relationships.”

The company employs more than 2,000 in its Dublin tech hub.

Mastercard is opening a second office at its Leopardstown campus tech hub in Dublin alongside announcing a number of commitments to expand its payments infrastructure in Europe.

The new building was officially opened today (8 October) by Taoiseach Micheál Martin, TD. It comes two decades after the company first established a base in the country. Since 2008, Mastercard’s workforce has grown from 36 to more than 2,000 in Dublin.

Mastercard is also committing to expand critical payments operations in Europe, with plans to bring in all components of local transactions into Europe by 2030. It already processes domestic transactions in France, Germany and Spain through its new European infrastructure.

The payments giant also said that all new Mastercard European credit and debit cards issued from next year will support offline payments.

A number of European countries, including Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Estonia, are rolling out offline payments in the region in response to heightened geopolitical tensions in the region as banks act to ensure payment infrastructure continues to work in case of an internet blackout.

“The opening of Mastercard’s new office is a strong endorsement of Ireland’s reputation as a leading location for innovation, technology and digital transformation,” said Taoiseach Martin.

“Mastercard has played a key role in shaping the future of payments and financial technology globally, and its continued expansion in Ireland highlights the strength of our talented workforce, pro-business environment and vibrant technology ecosystem.

“I warmly welcome this investment and look forward to seeing Mastercard continue to innovate and grow from its Irish base in the years ahead.”

Ed McLaughlin, the president and chief technology officer at Mastercard added: “From AI and cybersecurity to next-generation payments infrastructure that brings greater resilience and speed to commerce, the work happening here is helping build the future.

“This expansion of our European tech hub reflects the growth of our teams in Dublin, our confidence in Ireland’s talent, and our ambitions for the years ahead.”

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

If you entered your password on a phishing site, treat that password as exposed even if you have not seen any suspicious activity yet. Leave the fake page, open the real service independently, and secure the account before checking what else may have been affected.

Check for Signs the Account Was Used

Typing a password into a phishing page makes that password unsafe, but it does not by itself prove that the attacker successfully signed in. After securing the credential, look for evidence that somebody actually used the account.

• Unfamiliar devices or sessions: review the provider’s security or sign-in activity for devices, browsers, or sessions you do not recognize. Check the surrounding details before removing access because one physical device can sometimes create more than one session.
• Unexpected security alerts: look for notices about sign-ins, password resets, new devices, recovery changes, or other security events you did not initiate.
• Changed recovery details: confirm that recovery phone numbers, email addresses, security methods, and similar account controls still belong to you.
• Messages or posts you did not send: check sent mail, social-media messages, posts, and other outgoing activity. Unauthorized messages are a practical sign that someone may have used the account.
• Email forwarding or filtering you did not create: an attacker with email access may create rules that forward messages elsewhere or hide security and password-reset emails from your normal inbox.
• Purchases or service activity you do not recognize: check account-specific history where relevant, such as orders, subscriptions, payment activity, cloud files, or profile changes.

Google’s device history is one example of why account activity needs context: several sessions can belong to the same device, so inspect the details before deciding whether an entry is unfamiliar. If you find unauthorized activity, follow the provider’s security or recovery process and remove access where that control is available.

Broader signs that someone logged into your account can include security-setting changes, unfamiliar devices, and actions performed without your permission. If you need to investigate beyond the affected account, these signs your data has been compromised provide a wider audit of account, email, financial, and breach indicators.

What If You Shared More Than a Password?

A phishing incident can collect more than one type of information. Do not automatically perform every recovery action below. Identify what the site actually received or what you did on the device, then follow the matching branch.

A password-only incident does not automatically mean your device has malware, your bank details were stolen, or your identity documents were exposed. The response should expand only when the phishing interaction or later evidence shows another type of exposure.

How to Know the Account Is Secure Again

The immediate account-recovery phase is complete when you have addressed the realistic routes an attacker could still use. That does not prove nobody viewed or copied information while the password was exposed.

Continue watching security notifications and account activity after the immediate cleanup. If new unauthorized activity appears, use the provider’s official security or account-recovery process rather than returning to the phishing message.

For decades, Bose has been viewed by much of the audiophile world as a consumer electronics company operating outside the traditional high-end audio establishment. That description is becoming increasingly outdated. Its acquisition of McIntosh Group, along with continued expansion into automotive, immersive, and software-driven audio, suggests Bose is building a much broader audio technology business.

The latest move is the acquisition of Firelight Technologies, the Melbourne-based company behind FMOD. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Bose confirmed that Firelight will become part of its Audio Technology business while FMOD remains available to its existing customers and development community.

FMOD operates well below the level where most consumers encounter audio. Developers, sound designers, and composers use it to create sound that responds dynamically to events inside games and other interactive environments.

Unlike recorded music, which largely unfolds as mastered, interactive audio must react instantly as a player moves through a space, accelerates a car, fires a weapon, or triggers any number of events. FMOD integrates with Unity, Unreal Engine, custom game engines, consoles, computers, mobile devices, and web applications.

Bose is therefore not simply buying another audio technology company. It is acquiring software that helps determine how sound behaves inside virtual spaces. Gaming is the immediate opportunity, but Bose has also pointed to potential applications in VR/AR, automotive, and other real-time environments.

Related Reading:

The StreamUnlimited Deal Makes More Sense Now

Three months before buying Firelight, Bose acquired StreamUnlimited Engineering, a Vienna-based company that develops network-audio software, hardware modules, streaming technologies, certification tools, and other infrastructure used by consumer-electronics manufacturers.

That deal received far less attention outside the industry, but strategically it may be just as important.

Bose said StreamUnlimited would continue serving existing customers while helping the company expand its access to streaming technologies, services, and capabilities. Its solutions would also remain interoperable with third-party products and ecosystems rather than being locked inside Bose hardware.

Put the two acquisitions beside one another and an interesting picture starts to emerge.

StreamUnlimited provides connected-audio infrastructure. FMOD provides interactive-audio infrastructure. Bose already has decades of DSP and acoustic research, a substantial consumer-audio business, automotive relationships, and ownership of McIntosh and Sonus faber.

The company no longer needs every Bose technology to arrive inside a product carrying a Bose badge.

That may ultimately be the most consequential shift.

McIntosh & Sonus faber Changed the Conversation

Bose’s November 2024 acquisition of McIntosh Group, parent company of McIntosh Laboratory and Sonus faber, was the deal that forced the traditional high-end industry to pay attention.

McIntosh and Sonus faber occupy territory that Bose historically did not. McIntosh sells massive amplifiers, preamplifiers, source components, and systems whose blue meters have become symbols of American high-end audio. Sonus faber builds Italian loudspeakers that can involve wood, leather, carbon fiber, and enough artisanal craftsmanship to make assembling a Bluetooth speaker feel rather pedestrian.

Bose acquired both without attempting to turn either into Bose.

At the time, Bose said McIntosh and Sonus faber would continue concentrating on their established high-end categories while the companies explored opportunities together in the home, on the go, and in the car. Bose also specifically highlighted automotive as an area where its four decades of experience could complement the luxury brands.

That was important. Bose did not need to persuade traditional audiophiles that a $30,000 loudspeaker with its own logo was suddenly desirable. It bought two brands whose credibility in that market had already been established over generations.

Some audiophiles reacted as if Taco Bell had purchased Le Bernardin.

Nearly two years later, there is little evidence that Bose has hampered either company’s ability to innovate. If anything, both brands have continued behaving very much like themselves.

In 2026, McIntosh introduced the $15,000 MA2375, an unapologetically old-school, all-analog vacuum tube integrated amplifier with KT88 output tubes, Unity Coupled Circuit output transformers, MM/MC phono stages, and the blue meters that have been glowing in Binghamton for generations.

A few months later, it introduce the $12,500 CS7500 Streaming Preamplifier, combining McIntosh preamplification with Qobuz, Spotify, TIDAL, AirPlay, Google Cast, Roon, HDMI ARC, and high-resolution digital playback.

Sonus faber has hardly been sitting around waiting for instructions from Massachusetts either. Its new Olympica G3 Collection incorporates technology derived from the $750,000 Suprema, including the Camelia midrange driver, cork-damped internal chambers, redesigned woofers, and revised crossover networks, while retaining the wood, leather, asymmetrical cabinets, and Italian craftsmanship that define the brand.

The five-model range stretches from stereo listening into dedicated home theater applications without turning Sonus faber into something unrecognizable.

Whatever concerns surrounded the Bose acquisition in 2024, the evidence so far suggests that Bose understood the value of leaving both companies enough room to remain themselves.

The Car May Be Where Many of These Pieces Meet

Bose has worked in automotive audio since the early 1980s, and its current automotive business extends far beyond installing a branded amplifier and some door speakers.

The company has been developing SeatCentric technologies that can create different listening experiences for individual passengers, position navigation and safety alerts spatially, isolate telephone calls, manipulate perceived sound locations, and actively reduce unwanted audio in specific areas of a vehicle.

Its CES demonstrations have included Dolby Atmos, Perceptual Sound Rendering, individualized listening zones, UltraNearfield speakers, and 3D audio without conventional overhead speaker arrays. Bose has also integrated its audio processing directly into Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Digital Chassis, allowing automakers to run Bose tuning on the vehicle’s central computing platform rather than requiring a dedicated Bose DSP.

That last development deserves more attention.

The automobile is rapidly becoming a software-defined environment. Music, navigation, phone calls, safety alerts, voice assistants, entertainment, engine-sound synthesis, active noise cancellation, gaming, and potentially augmented reality increasingly share the same computing infrastructure.

FMOD specializes in audio that reacts to events in real time.

You can probably see why Bose might find that interesting.

There is no announced Bose-FMOD automotive product, and connecting those dots should not be confused with reporting one. But Bose already talks about interactive cabin experiences where sound changes according to passenger location, vehicle information, and surrounding conditions. FMOD comes from a world where responsive audio is the entire point.

The overlap is difficult to ignore.

QuietComfort Is Still Extremely Important

All of this could make it sound as though Bose has lost interest in selling headphones.

It has not.

The QuietComfort franchise remains one of Bose’s most powerful consumer businesses, and the company continues investing in adaptive ANC, immersive audio, personalization, voice pickup, and spatial processing. Its QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen), for example, retained the company’s CustomTune system while adding improved adaptive noise cancellation, voice pickup, and wireless charging.

Bose’s expertise in noise cancellation may actually be more strategically valuable today than when the technology was primarily used to make an airplane cabin tolerable.

Noise control, individualized audio, spatial rendering, and perceptual processing increasingly apply across headphones, vehicles, AR/VR environments, gaming, and smart spaces. A company capable of moving those technologies between categories does not need to win every market with the same physical product.

The QuietComfort headphones are the consumer-facing part most people know.

The intellectual property underneath them is where things get interesting.

And Then There Is Home Theater

Bose also remains a major participant in soundbars and home entertainment, another category increasingly defined by software rather than the number of drivers somebody managed to cram into an enclosure.

Dolby Atmos, virtualized height information, room adaptation, dialogue enhancement, psychoacoustic processing, and sound-field manipulation all require expertise in making listeners perceive sound in places where a physical loudspeaker may not exist.

Gaming and VR present variations of the same fundamental problem. So does automotive.

That does not mean Bose will merge its soundbar, automotive, and FMOD engineering teams into some giant spatial-audio Voltron next Tuesday. It means the company has accumulated expertise in several businesses where software determines what the listener perceives as much as the transducer does.

The walls between those businesses are getting thinner.

Bose Is Building More Than Products

The more interesting conclusion is that Bose increasingly operates across multiple layers of the audio business rather than simply manufacturing products. Its recent acquisitions give it deeper involvement in connected audio, interactive sound, luxury hi-fi, and automotive, but the company has also started moving upstream into music itself.

In 2026, Bose launched Bose Studios and Bose Records, with plans to work with emerging and underrecognized artists while developing original music, video, podcasts, live events, and other content. Bose has said it does not intend to own artists’ masters or take a share of their streaming and record sales, making the initiative less of a conventional record-label play than another way for the company to participate in the music ecosystem.

Automotive extends that reach further. Bose already works directly with major vehicle manufacturers, while its integration with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Digital Chassis allows Bose audio processing to run directly on the vehicle’s Snapdragon Cockpit Platform rather than requiring a dedicated Bose DSP inside an amplifier.

Taken together, Bose now has potential involvement in how audio is created, distributed, processed, personalized, and ultimately reproduced — even when Bose did not manufacture the headphones or loudspeakers through which someone hears it.

That is a very different business from selling Wave Radios.

Perhaps Audiophiles Need to Update Their Opinion of Bose

Bose has spent decades occupying an awkward place in audiophile culture.

Its products became enormously popular, which in certain corners of high-end audio is apparently grounds for suspicion. The company’s willingness to use DSP, psychoacoustics, compact enclosures, and unconventional engineering also did not always endear it to a community that can become emotionally attached to technologies whose greatest innovation occurred before the first moon landing.

You do not have to love every Bose product to recognize how outdated that dismissal has become.

This is a company that owns McIntosh and Sonus faber, controls one of gaming’s important interactive-audio platforms, owns a major connected-audio engineering operation, remains deeply embedded in automotive, and continues to compete near the top of the global ANC headphone market.

Other audio companies may have stronger credibility in individual categories.

Very few now cover this many categories at once. And fewer still possess technologies capable of moving between them.

What Could Bose Be Planning?

The temptation is to imagine one enormous Bose ecosystem connecting McIntosh amplifiers, Sonus faber loudspeakers, QuietComfort headphones, FMOD gaming audio, automotive systems, and StreamUnlimited software.

There is currently no evidence Bose intends to build that, and it may not need to.

The more plausible strategy is also potentially more powerful: own important audio technologies across multiple markets and allow them to reinforce one another without forcing everything into a single consumer platform. FMOD can continue serving game developers. StreamUnlimited can continue working with outside manufacturers. McIntosh can remain McIntosh, while Sonus faber can keep building loudspeakers in Italy that look considerably nicer than most people’s furniture.

What Bose gains is optionality. Interactive audio developed for games could influence immersive automotive experiences. Automotive personalization could inform future headphones or AR products. Streaming infrastructure can support connected products across multiple brands, while Bose’s DSP, ANC, and psychoacoustic expertise can migrate almost anywhere that microphones and speakers coexist.

Not every piece needs to connect directly for the collection to become valuable. Bose increasingly has a position in how sound is created, processed, distributed, personalized, and reproduced across the home, the car, headphones, games, and other interactive environments. That is a considerably larger ambition than selling more speakers with a Bose logo on the front.

The Firelight acquisition pushes Bose even further beyond the traditional definition of an audio manufacturer. The company appears to be positioning itself for a future in which the most influential audio businesses will not merely build excellent speakers or headphones; they will control important pieces of the software, signal processing, connectivity, content, personalization, and hardware required to deliver sound wherever people happen to be listening.

Audiophiles are free to keep making jokes about the 901.

Godzilla does not generally stop walking because the villagers are laughing.

Related Reading:

Choose the career you want before choosing a programming language. A language is useful when it matches the work, platforms, and employer requirements you are likely to face, not simply because it appears near the top of a popularity chart.

A practical way to decide is to identify a target role, see which languages repeatedly appear in that kind of work, check the jobs you could realistically apply for, and then learn one language deeply enough to build a relevant project.

Start With the Job You Want, Not the Language

“I want to become a programmer” is usually too broad to tell you what to learn. A web developer, data scientist, Android developer, game developer, and general software developer may all write code, but they work with different tools and solve different problems.

The occupation itself matters. In the United States, employment for software developers is projected to grow 10% from 2025 to 2035, while employment for the narrower occupation called computer programmer is projected to decline 7% over the same period. Those are different occupations with different duties and outlooks, so “programming” alone is not a precise career target.

If you have not decided whether you want software development, data work, web development, cybersecurity, or another technical path, it makes sense to compare different IT career fields before treating a programming language as the first decision.

Start by asking what you would like to build or work on. For example:

• Do you want to create websites people use in a browser?
• Do you want to analyze data or work toward machine-learning roles?
• Do you want to build Android or Apple apps?
• Do you want to work on business software, back-end services, or internal applications?
• Do you want to develop games?

Your answer does not have to describe your entire career. It only needs to be specific enough to narrow the tools you should investigate first.

Match Career Goals to the Languages Employers Use

Once you have a target, compare it with the languages and tools that appear in that type of work. Current U.S. job-posting data illustrate why one universal language recommendation is not very useful.

For example, JavaScript appeared in 47% of the 2025 U.S. web-developer postings mapped by O*NET, while Python appeared in 21%. For data-scientist postings, Python appeared in 66%, SQL in 51%, and R in 34%. Software-development postings were more mixed, with Python at 29%, Java at 25%, SQL at 24%, JavaScript at 20%, C# at 12%, and C++ at 10%. These percentages describe skills mentioned in mapped U.S. postings, not the percentage of professionals using each language and not your probability of getting hired. Current web-development posting data, data-science posting data, and software-development posting data show the difference.

For Android, the platform itself gives a strong signal: Google recommends that developers start with Kotlin for new Android development. For Apple development, Swift is designed for Apple platforms, so it is the natural language to investigate first if that ecosystem is your target.

Game development shows why the surrounding platform can be as important as the language. Unity supports scripting in C#, while Unreal Engine provides a C++ programming framework. That does not mean every game-development role uses only one of those languages; the engine and job determine which skills matter.

Once you know your likely career direction, you can compare beginner-friendly programming languages by learning difficulty, ecosystem, and typical uses without treating the broader list as a career ranking.

If your choice has narrowed to two common general-purpose options, Python vs JavaScript for career changers often comes down to whether your target work leans toward data, automation and general software tasks or toward browser-based application development.

Check What Employers Actually Ask For

National data gives you a useful starting point, but the jobs available to you may look different. Location, industry, company size, seniority, and an employer’s existing systems can all change which languages matter most.

Instead of searching only for “Python jobs” or “JavaScript jobs,” search for the role you want. If you want junior front-end work, look at junior front-end developer vacancies. If you want data analysis, examine data analyst and entry-level data-science listings. If you want Android work, look specifically at Android developer roles.

Collect several suitable listings rather than basing the decision on one vacancy. For each one, note:

• the main programming languages requested;
• frameworks and other tools that appear repeatedly;
• whether a skill is listed as required or preferred;
• the experience level requested;
• any platform or industry requirement that changes the technical stack.

Patterns matter more than unusual one-off requirements. If the same language appears across many suitable vacancies while another appears only once, that gives you a stronger reason to investigate the repeated language. Do not turn a small personal sample into a precise market statistic, though. Its purpose is to check whether broader guidance resembles the jobs you can actually target.

Reading programming job listings before choosing what to learn also helps you separate the core language from surrounding technologies. A posting may mention JavaScript, React, Git, Amazon Web Services, and SQL together, but those names do not all describe the same type of skill.

Specialized environments can change the answer further. In statistical and data work, for example, the software your target employer actually uses may matter more than a general popularity ranking. A workplace built around SAS creates a different learning priority from one built around R or Python.

Be careful with job-posting percentages. O*NET’s current software-skill tables use Lightcast postings from the United States between January 1 and December 31, 2025. The percentage is the share of unique postings linked to that occupation that mention the skill. It does not show how many professionals know the language, how difficult it will be for you to get hired, or what employers in another country or region will request.

If you find too few suitable vacancies to see any pattern, broaden the search carefully. Try closely related job titles or a wider location while keeping the same career level and type of work. Do not respond to a thin sample by assuming every technology mentioned anywhere in the field belongs on your learning list.

If the vacancies you find appear to demand several unrelated languages from every beginner, entry-level developer jobs that ask for too many technologies should be read carefully before you assume you must master every item in the description.

You have finished the decision process when you can name one target role, explain why your chosen language fits that role, identify at least one relevant project you can build with it, and confirm that no major platform requirement blocks you from starting.

If two languages still appear equally suitable after checking real vacancies, choose the one that lets you build the more relevant project with the resources and equipment you already have. Your first language is not a permanent career contract.

When a Second Programming Language Becomes Worth Learning

A second language becomes useful when it solves a problem your first one does not solve well enough for the work you now want to do. Adding languages simply to make a skills list longer is a weak reason to switch.

Consider learning another language when target vacancies repeatedly ask for it, a platform or engine requires it, your projects have moved into a different technical area, or you need to work with an existing codebase written in that language.

For example, someone who began with Python for data work may later add SQL because querying databases becomes part of the job. A JavaScript learner moving deeper into typed front-end development may encounter TypeScript. A developer who begins with C# in Unity may later decide to learn C++ because the roles or Unreal projects they want require it.

By this point, many core programming ideas should transfer. Variables, conditions, loops, functions, data structures, debugging, and breaking a problem into smaller steps remain relevant even when syntax and platform tools change. That makes a second language easier to approach once you already know how to solve basic programming problems in the first one.

Your career goal should remain the filter. Learn another language when your work gives you a reason, not because a ranking tells you that every developer should know the same collection of technologies.

£74 has come off one of the largest sets Lego has ever made, with Rivendell dropping to £355.99 for Prime Day.

Lego Icons The Lord of the Rings: Rivendell usually carries an RRP of £429.99, but its Prime Day price of £355.99 cuts £74 or 17% from a 6,167-piece build that recreates the elven refuge where the Fellowship of the Ring was forged.