2015 IT Skills That Will Pay Them Bills

I’ve talked at length about how technology and skills will fuel the IT career path, including why Hybrid Cloud matters to IT pros. I’ve also talked about how IT generalists, admins with a broad range of IT knowledge (but not very much depth), need to evolve in order to survive. In addition, I have mentioned that two groups of IT professionals are in the best position to not only survive, but thrive. They are the specialists and the versatilists. IT specialists are experts in a particular IT discipline or domain. IT versatilists take it a step further by being experts across a few related IT disciplines. For more context, please refer to my Mission Critical article on the Stack Wars‌. Note that this write-up is gated. It takes skills and tools for IT pros to provide business utility. With this in mind, the important thing for IT pros to answer is, what skills are companies hiring and paying premiums for?


Rich Hein recently published “Hot IT skills that will get you hired and well-paid” on networkworld.com that highlights survey data from tech job site, Dice.com. The numbers of opportunities and average salaries are tremendous for IT professionals. Below are the breakdown of skills, year-over-year growth, average annual salary, and the number of jobs currently listed on Dice.com.

Skill

YoY Growth

Avg Salary

Job count

Cybersecurity

98%

95,824

3058

Puppet

66%

120,072

1254

Big data

49%

116,414

2392

Hadoop

48%

121,313

2246

NoSQL

40%

118,587

1866

Cloud

35%

104,373

7106

Python

31%

101,312

5612

Waterfall

23%

107,937

1313

Salesforce

17%

99,410

1074

  1. Cybersecurity – think about all the corporate hacks that have taken place in the past year or so. Sony, Target, Anthem come to mind. Any data center environment requires infrastructure hardening, including monitoring and logging for forensics.
  2. Puppet – think configuration management at scale. Easy to automate and orchestrate those changes.
  3. Big data, Hadoop, and NoSQL – think about answers to questions that leverage vast amount of disparate and unstructured data—analyzed in a relative short amount of time.
  4. Cloud – think hype or hope for IT operations trying to move at biz operations pace.
  5. Python – think coding at web-scale.
  6. Waterfall – think flowing downwards through all the phases of the software development cycle.
  7. Salesforce – think customer relationship management. The bottom line is all about the business.

Below is the 2014-2015 Dice Salary Survey for Big Data skills. The image is from Rich's article.

Dice Salary Survey.png

IT departments are making tough business-driven decisions on their budgetary spend. Don't stand still with your IT skills. Pick up some IT skills mentioned above and help extend the life of your IT career. And one more thing - go get paid!

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