This family covers product and UX designers as well as engineering designers, so it spans screen design and physical products. Tool requirements differ sharply between the two, which is why both Figma and CAD appear here.
We analyzed 303 U.S. job descriptions from 116 employers for Design roles. The most requested skills were Prototyping (32%), CAD (27%) and Project management (14%).
2,575open U.S. roles tracked
5 yearstypical experience asked for
$177,300median advertised pay, from 351 roles that state it
Product & design
Prototyping32%
Project management14%
Design systems14%
Figma12%
Roadmapping11%
User research5%
Agile5%
Hardware
CAD27%
PCB design5%
Electrical systems4%
RTL design4%
FPGA3%
HVAC and cooling3%
Languages
Python10%
Verilog5%
MATLAB5%
Operations
Root cause analysis8%
Business tools
PowerPoint8%
Excel8%
Data
Statistics6%
AI & machine learning
LLMs5%
Machine learning5%
Generative AI3%
Updated November 7, 2026, using job descriptions collected since October 8, 2026. Shares show how many of the sampled descriptions mention a skill, so a low share can still be a firm requirement in the roles that list it. We sample a limited number of descriptions per employer so that no single company dominates, and we only report figures backed by several employers. Advertised pay comes from a different group of roles than H1B filings, so the two are not directly comparable.
