In a recent survey cited by Dice, an interesting dichotomy played out. Employers will be more cautious about hiring tech talent in the first half of 2017 than one year ago. However, at the same time, nearly 60 percent believe salaries for new employees will increase in 2017 and 55 percent said they were having trouble filling positions due to existing salary restrictions.
Another recent survey found that, in order to lock down top talent, one-third of tech employers are willing to pay a 10-15 percent salary premium. Are they paying an unnecessary price to lock in top talent? Likely not, found another survey in which 65 percent of tech professionals said they would make the jump to a new job in order to secure higher compensation.
So with employers becoming more selective when hiring, what remains the highest paying tech skills? Dice recently answered that question with a list of the top four fastest growing tech skills and their salaries.
- Apache Spark: Demand for this open-source cluster-computing framework is up 120 percent year-over-year with government contractors and financial-services firms among the employers seeking out the newly trending skill. Average salary with this skillset is $113,214.
- Big data: Dice groups cloud and big data services such as Azure, Hive and Cassandra as a continued trend when it comes to companies expanding their tech infrastructures, and seeking tech professionals who know data storage, analysis and security. Average salary with this skillset is $121,328.
- Salesforce: The rise in customer service applications has catapulted the value of tech, sales and marketing professionals who can work within the salesforce framework. Average salary with this skillset is $107,810.
- JIRA: This open-source project-management platform has enjoyed an increasing rate of adoption over the past few years. Average salary with this skillset is $111,103.
Other highest paying tech skills for 2017 include:
- HANA: An in-memory database created by enterprise-software company SAP. Average salary with this skillset is $154,749.
- Cloudera: This is an extremely popular commercial version of the open-source Hadoop platform, which is designed for storing data. Average salary with this skillset is $142,835.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS is a type of cloud computing that is a huge trend right now in app development. Average salary with this skillset is $140,894.
- OpenStack: An open-source cloud-computing operating system which has increased in demand by nearly 20 percent in the past year. Average salary with this skillset is $138,579.
- Chef: IT automation software ushering in DevOps. Average salary with this skillset is $136,850.
- Pig: A programming language that extracts information from Hadoop. MapReduce is another Hadoop-related program with a similar salary. Average salary with this skillset is $132,850.
When it comes to certifications, Global Knowledge has noticed trends in security, virtualization and cloud computing, and networking. These include:
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, with an average salary of $125,871.
- Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC), with an average salary of $122,954.
- Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), with an average salary of $122,291.
- Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), with an average salary of $121,923.
- Project Management Professional (PMP), with an average salary of $116,094.
While these tech skills and certifications take top billing among software developers and other IT professionals, Dice urges employers to not forget soft skills, too. Most in demand (and woefully hard to find) are those who are 1) unafraid to learn on the job, 2) manage their careers aggressively (which means keeping up-to-date on skills), and 3) effectively schedule their time.
Have you become more selective about hiring certain tech professionals? For which tech skills will you pay a premium? Are the skills related to certain programming languages or are they soft skills/qualities? If those skills aren’t on our list, let us know about them by sharing with us on social.
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