Dive Brief:
- Storage and networking skills were in strong enough demand to warrant pay increases in 2016, even as most tech salaries remained flat, according to the 2017 Dice Salary Survey.
- Tech workers with skills in Compellent, Drupal, JCL, FCoE, Nimble, and Hbase saw the biggest salary increases over 2015. The highest-paid skills in 2016 were HANA, MapReduce, Cloud Foundry, Hbase and Omnigraffle. Each of those skills commanded salaries between $128,958 and $123,780.
- In addition to increase salaries, the report says flex schedules and challenging tasks and projects were key motivators for tech workers.
Dive Insight:
The types of skills in demand are also an indicator of where enterprises are heading with tech efforts. Storage and networking skills often correlate with efforts around digital transformation and migration to the cloud. As those areas grow, people with matching tech skills will be most desired.
Workers with storage and networking skills can demand higher salaries — for now.
But as Dice president Bob Melk points out, what's in-demand today may not be what's hot tomorrow. That makes educating and training tech workers more difficult. Digital transformation, AI and IoT are front and center today, but the gold rush for IT skills could swing in another direction.
