Analysis · October 24, 2026 · data as of October 24, 2026

What 7,456 creative job listings list as skills, by discipline

Across eight disciplines in 7,456 LinkedIn-sourced listings, tool skills follow craft and, among 98 tracked terms, only Campaigns and Social media reach 20% in seven of eight.

In 7,456 LinkedIn-sourced Hired Creative listings read on 2026-10-24 and placed by title in eight disciplines, the listed skills differ sharply by discipline. The mean similarity between the eight skill profiles is 0.57 on a 0 to 1 scale, and UX / product design against social media is 0.09. An Adobe-family skill is listed in 81% of graphic design listings (n=1,750) and 79% of motion listings (n=1,242), against 28% of UX listings (n=1,598), where Figma is listed in 70%. Among the 98 skill terms tracked, only Campaigns and Social media reach 20% of listings in seven of the eight disciplines, with UX the exception.

LinkedIn-sourced listings carry 7.0 extracted skills each on average, against 1.6 for listings from all other sources (n=9,781 and n=10,809), so only they are used. The figures describe listed text in this base. They are not shares of all creative hiring and do not show what employers want.

Key points

• In 7,456 LinkedIn-sourced listings read on 2026-10-24, UX and social media listings share almost no listed skills (similarity 0.09 on a 0 to 1 scale).
• An Adobe-family skill is listed in 81% of graphic design and 79% of motion listings but 28% of UX listings, where Figma appears in 70% (n=1,750, 1,242, 1,598).
• Among 98 tracked skill terms, only Campaigns and Social media reach 20% of listings in seven of eight disciplines (not UX); none reaches even 10% in all eight.

What the data covers

The export holds 20,590 listings. Each has a title, a source and a skills field: terms found in the listing text by keyword matching against a fixed vocabulary of 109 terms. The matched text is not recorded, and it includes the title.

Skill counts depend on the source: 2.5% of LinkedIn-sourced listings carry no skill, against 36.7% from other sources. A gap between disciplines could be a gap between sources, so the comparison stays inside LinkedIn-sourced listings. That removes the main source-mix effect, but each LinkedIn search still returns what its keywords ask for.

Communications / PR and Strategy / brand marketing are communications and marketing roles, not craft design, and carry the fewest skills per listing (2.9 and 4.2, against 8.5 to 9.9 for UX, graphic and motion).

How far apart the profiles are

A discipline's profile is the share of its listings that list each of the 98 tracked skills. Two profiles are compared by cosine similarity: 1 means identical proportions, 0 means no shared skill. The mean over all pairs of the eight disciplines is 0.57.

UX / product design is least similar to Communications / PR and to Social media / content creator (0.09 each). The most similar pairs are Communications / PR with Strategy / brand marketing (0.90) and with Social media / content creator (0.90).

A label-shuffle permutation test (300 shuffles) gave a mean of 0.995, range 0.993 to 0.996. That value sits near the ceiling of 1, so the test shows only that labels carry information. It does not size the gap; the pair values do that better.

Splitting each discipline's listings in two by collection group leaves the leading skills of seven of the eight disciplines largely in place (Communications / PR could not be split), though the full ordering is looser for copy and strategy.

Tool skills split by craft

An Adobe-family skill means any of: Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe XD, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro.

Figma is listed in 70% of UX listings, 35% of graphic design, 13% of motion and 1% of Communications / PR listings (n=504).

Against the other seven disciplines pooled, Prototyping is in 67% of UX listings against 4%, Premiere Pro in 65% of motion listings against 9%, Illustrator in 64% of graphic listings against 14%, and InDesign in 47% against 5%. Art direction (66% of art and creative direction listings against 4%) and Copywriting (48% of copy listings against 5%) also separate, but they are largely the job title itself, because the extraction reads the title.

UX design leads UX listings (88%), Motion graphics leads motion (72%) and Social media leads social media (96%), each craft-named and partly built in by the title. Campaigns leads the other five: graphic 64% (tied with Illustrator and Photoshop), art and creative direction 80%, copy 64%, Communications / PR 65% and Strategy 77%.

What is shared

Among the 98 tracked terms, and at a 20% line, only Campaigns and Social media appear in seven of the eight disciplines in the pooled base. UX is the exception, with Campaigns in 8% of listings and Social media in 5%. No tracked skill reaches even 10% in every one of the eight.

The result depends on the line: at 10%, Branding and Editing also appear in seven of eight disciplines. It also depends on a vocabulary centred on craft and tools, which cannot show whether skills outside it are shared.

Against other studies

These are rough consistency checks on different bases, not replications. Huntr read 5,717 graphic designer postings and reports Figma in 35% and Adobe Creative Suite in 57%; Hired Creative's graphic design listings show 35% and 51% (n=1,750). The Figma match is a coincidence of different bases. InterviewStack reports Figma in 31.7% of 3,675 UX Designer postings against 70% here (n=1,598), so absolute shares depend on the base and the extraction. Nesta's analysis of 35 million UK job adverts from 2013 to 2017 finds employers need project management skills alongside creativity; no tracked term names it, so these listings cannot show whether it is asked for.

Method

Data: the Hired Creative listings export read on 2026-10-24 (20,590 listings). The skills field lists terms matched by keyword against a fixed vocabulary of 109 terms. The analysis tracks 98 of them individually and pools the other 11, which are not analysed.

Base: LinkedIn-sourced listings (source name beginning "linkedin") with at least one skill, placed in a discipline by title. A discipline is reported only if it has at least 100 listings in the base. Eight meet this, with 7,456 listings in total.

Discipline: from the lowercased title, by ordered keyword rules in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German; the first matching rule wins. Among the eight the order is art and creative direction, copy (writing terms), motion, UX, graphic and brand, social media, copy (content terms), communications, strategy and marketing. Example keywords: "art director", "copywriter", "motion", "ux", "graphic", "social media", "communications", "marketing". A hand read of 20 random titles in each of 12 title buckets (the 8 disciplines, three small buckets not reported, and an engineering contrast set aside) found 226 of 240 correct (94%), uncertain by 15 to 20 points per bucket. The analyst did the read, and recall was only spot checked.

Shares: the share of a discipline's base listings that list a skill, with Wilson 95% intervals. Separating skills are the share in a discipline minus the share in the other seven pooled, for skills at 10% or more in that discipline.

Similarity: cosine similarity between two disciplines' vectors of shares over the 98 tracked skills, averaged over all pairs. The permutation test shuffled the discipline labels over the 7,456 listings 300 times and recomputed the mean.

Robustness: each discipline's listings were split into two groups by collection group, with at least 100 listings per group, and the top skills compared. A second check used all LinkedIn-sourced listings in a discipline, including those with no skill, as the denominator for its leading skill. Shares moved by 2 points or less in seven disciplines and from 65.3% to 59.3% in Communications / PR.

Countries with fewer than 30 listings, and any whose separate reporting could identify a sensitive location, are pooled.

Limits

• The skills field is keyword extraction over a vocabulary built around craft and tools. A missing skill is not proof the employer did not ask for it, and the vocabulary has no project management or general communication term. Lightcast's methodology notes that a data element can be "Unclassified" because the information is absent from the advertisement or cannot be extracted.
• The extraction reads the title, and the discipline is also read from the title. A critic would say part of each leading skill is built in. Prototyping, Premiere Pro and Illustrator are less exposed than UX design, Social media, Art direction and Copywriting.
• Only LinkedIn-sourced listings are used. Shares describe this base and are not market shares.
• The title classifier is self-graded, and listings with generic titles sit in no discipline. Communications / PR is the thinnest group.
• Wilson 95% intervals are about 2 to 4 points either side for disciplines with n of 500 or more, and 5 to 6 for Strategy / brand marketing (n=237).
• The 20% line and the pooled base decide which skills count as shared. The result does not say no other skills are shared.
• Huntr's page gives 6,844 postings in its title and 5,717 in its body; the body figure is used. Nesta is not a study of skills by discipline.
• This is a snapshot of one export. It shows nothing about change over time, pay, which skills win jobs, or why disciplines differ, and it implies no cause.

Sources

• Huntr, Graphic Designer Skills: What 6,844 Job Posts Require (2026)
• InterviewStack, UX Designer Skills in 2026
• Nesta, Creativity and the future of skills
• Lightcast, Job Posting Analytics methodology
• Hired Creative listings export, 2026-10-24 (n=20,590 listings; n=7,456 in the analysis base).

Published by Hired Creative from its own listings and the sources above. Spotted an error? Tell us.