At Curricular, my team and I spend hours researching, reviewing, and recommending the best ways to learn development skills. You can check out our learning guides at curricular.dev

As part of our research, we decided to compile a list of the skill areas that are needed to work professionally as a Frontend Developer, independent of frameworks or tooling.

And now I'd like your feedback.

About the List of Essential Skills for Junior Frontend Developers

My team interviewed a bunch of senior developers, sifted through a lot of the readily-available online advice, and debated with one another to produce this list.

Our goal is to help aspiring front end developers understand which technical skills are most important to prioritize, in order to excel as a Frontend Developer and meet or exceed your teammates' expectations.

Of course, learning never stops, and some skills are important to acquire as you gain experience as a junior developer. So we've separated skills into a Foundational List and a Growth List with new and Junior Frontend developers in mind.

The items in the Growth list are things that a Junior developer would not be expected to handle alone, right out of school, on a team.

Within each, the knowledge areas have been categorized into domains: Data, Rendering, and Organization. These are somewhat loose domains meant to help you consider skills based on their main purpose.

Often the skills cross into multiple areas, so don't take this as a strict classification; placing a skill in one domain versus another doesn't mean that it precludes the others. For example, hydration involves both data and rendering thereof.

Again, the list is framework and tool agnostic, so you won't see things like CSS, JavaScript, React on it. Instead, we're trying to get at the techniques and responsibilities within the stack that will be necessary regardless of the languages, frameworks and tools.

And of course, these are technical skills. There are additional nontechnical skills you'll need in order to excel, like teamwork, creativity, problem solving, pair programming, and estimation. Those are also left off at this point.

I'm excited to hear your feedback!

Essential Skills for Junior Front End Developers

Foundational Skills

Data

• HTTP Requests
• Data Manipulation
• State Management
• Events
• User Input
• Metadata
• Error Handling

Rendering

• Routing
• Hydration
• DOM Manipulation
• Images
• Page Styling
• Responsive Layout

Organization

• Code organization
• File structure
• Code readability
• DRY Code
• 3rd-party libraries
• Testing
• Documentation
• Version Control
• Code debugging

Growth Skills

Data

• Authentication and Authorization
• Security
• Transport Protocols
• Search Engine Optimization
• Times and Dates
• Local Storage

Rendering

• Multimedia
• Web Accessibility (A11y)
• Performance
• Animations

Organization

• Project Infrastructure
• Project management
• Deployment

What Do You Think?

Have we missed anything critical that you'd expect from a junior frontend developer? Are there any skills on this list that you're surprised about? Or confused about? Let me know in the comments.