Tech Skills that can Mean Big Salaries in 2017

If you’re looking for a job in tech, you’re not likely to have a problem finding one. You have to constantly update your skills, though, because tech skills are always coming and going with the latest trends in the industry. Dice.com published a 2015 Salary Survey that listed the highest-paying skills in tech after it queried 23,470 IT professionals. While work experience counts, Talent Development Solutions recaps the tech skills you should consider learning if you want to earn a salary over six figures. Here are a few of them.

1.) PaaS = $130,081

PaaS is “Platform as a Service,” and it is a kind of cloud computing. When a developer writes an app, PaaS hosts everything they need to create it. The app then stays on the PaaS cloud. The PaaS market is big, and companies want their piece of the pie by creating apps. When the BusinessInsider article was written in 2015, Dice had more than 370 PaaS-related positions available.

2.) Cassandra = $128,646

One “noSQL” database is Cassandra. Even better, it’s free and open source. A “noSQL” database is able to deal with and keep data of all sorts and sizes. More and more, people are using noSQL databases for cloud and mobile apps. Netflix, Apple, and many other companies use Cassandra to store massive amounts of data. Between 2014 and 2015, pay for jobs related to Cassandra increased 14.5 percent. Dice had 780 jobs posted in 2015 for Cassandra-related openings.

3.) Hadoop = $121,313

The purpose of Hadoop is to “gather and store vast amounts of data and analyze it on low-cost commodity hardware,” according to BusinessInsider. Fraud detection and online shopping services are two of its uses. Banks can use it to keep account holders’ information safe, and ecommerce services can track the ins and outs of customers’ buying patterns. Pay for Hadoop-related jobs increased 11.6 percent between 2014 and 2015, and over 2,220 jobs on Dice were listed for it.

4.) Chef = $123,458

If you know Chef, you’re familiar with software that is helping to bring in the DevOps trend, which is a situation in which developers creating apps and IT workers implementing them (operations) cooperate to bring tech to the market as quickly as possible. Chef is a software program that helps computer servers run efficiently by automating certain tasks.

5.) Cloudera = $126,816

Remember Hadoop from #3? Well, Cloudera makes a commercially-available version of Hadoop. The free version of Hadoop is not particularly easy to use, so it makes sense to have a version that organizations can use more easily. Cloudera is not the only company to have released a commercially-available version of Hadoop, but it is probably the most popular. If you know Cloudera, you’re looking at a pay increase of 20 percent in 2015 for jobs related to it compared to 2014, according to Dice. The site had more than 200 job openings listed for Cloudera.

6.) MapReduce = $127,315

MapReduce enables Hadoop to store data by spreading it over many inexpensive servers. A programmer creates software (many times in Java) for MapReduce to gather substantive data from Hadoop. Between 2014 and 2015, jobs related to MapReduce increased in salary 11 percent. Dice had more than 500 jobs associated with MapReduce.