Evolving technological sectors such as storage and networking — where cloud and IoT disruption are changing the industry — are seeing the biggest demand and best salaries according to a new survey by Dice, the tech jobs website.
The transformation of an industry generally creates a demand for higher skilled workers and salaries rise with that demand, even though Dice found that overall tech salaries in the U.S. were essentially flat year-over-year — down 1 percent to $92,081 from $93,328 in 2015.
The survey also looks at what motivates workers to change employers, what employers do best to retain employees, the top salaries by job title, the top paying skills, and the top tech metro areas by salary.
In that final category, Seattle was seventh best in 2016 out of 27 cities across the U.S. The average tech salary of $99,290 in Seattle was down 2.3 percent year over year, and put the city behind Silicon Valley, Boston, San Diego, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York.
“Skills that were used a year ago may not be as prominent today; skills that are relevant today will evolve tomorrow,” Bob Melk, president of Dice said in a news release. “This creates a marketplace where both tech professionals and employers must keep their fingers on the pulse of skills training and demand. The skills areas which garnered salary increases indicate where professionals and employers should focus their training and recruiting efforts.”
The top 10 biggest salary increases over 2015 were associated with the following skills:
- Compellent (11 percent)
- Drupal (9 percent)
- JCL (7 percent)
- FCoE (7% percent)
- Nimble (6 percent)
- Hbase (6 percent)
- MariaDB (5 percent)
- Pure Storage (5 percent)
- vCloud (5 percent)
- T1 or T3 (5 percent)
Overall, the highest-paid skills in 2016 were:
- HANA $128,958
- MapReduce $125,009
- Cloud Foundry $124,038
- Hbase $123,934
- Omnigraffle $123,782
- Cassandra $123,459
- Apache Kafka $122,728
- SOA – Service Oriented Architecture $122,094
- Ansible $121,382
- Jetty $120,978
