New Delhi, Jan 10 (IANS): Blockchain and affiliate marketing are the two new skills companies will seek the most in 2020, a LinkedIn report on 'Top 10 most in-demand hard skills' revealed on Friday.

With the decline of traditional advertising and the rise of social media, affiliate marketing is rapidly rising as a must-have hard skill.

"Afiliate marketing leverages company partnerships or influencers that are hyper-targeted to a particular audience," said the report.

Blockchain was born in 2009 to support the use of cryptocurrency and it's novel way to store, validate, authorize, and move data across the Internet has evolved to securely store and send any digital asset.

"The small supply of professionals who have this skill are in high demand," said the Microsoft-owned platform.

Other top hard skills are Cloud computing, analytical reasoning, UX Design, business analysis, Sales, video production and scientific computing.

"Companies need more professionals that can develop machine learning models and apply statistical and analytical approaches to large data sets using programs like Python, MATLAB, and others," the findings showed.

LinkedIn Learning surfaced data from the network of over 660 million professionals and more than 20 million jobs to reveal the 15 most in-demand soft and hard skills of 2020.

Among the five top trending soft skills in demand are creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and emotional intelligence.

"New to the most in-demand skills list this year, the need for emotional intelligence underscores the importance of effectively responding to and interacting with our colleagues," said LinkedIn.