By: Sarah White
It’s a great time to be in tech. According to data from Dice, technology salaries in the U.S. rose to an average of $96,370 per year. That’s a 7.7 percent increase and the biggest year-over-year jump in average tech salaries since Dice began tracking this data over 10 years ago.
In addition, Dice also reports a jump in salaried positions, contract rates and bonuses from 2014. In seven major-metro areas, tech salaries averaged in the six-figure range for the first time in the past decade. As of August, these are the top 10 highest paying and fastest growing IT skills, according to research and data from Dice.
Businesses are collecting more data than ever before, but with all that data comes a need for someone to manage it and maintain the systems used to store it all. Spark is one of the more commonly used tools to process petabytes of data, which is especially useful for companies that offer streaming services and need to manage heavy traffic.
If you have Spark skills on your resume, you’ll be happy to hear that this skill is up 85 percent in market value year over year; the average salary for a tech worker with Spark skills is $113,214 as of August 2016.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that helps businesses build, deploy and manage apps and software hosted on Microsoft’s data centers. The software also comes with a suite of built-in tools that make it easier for businesses to manage everything from mobile devices to the internet of things.
As technology becomes more complex for nearly every business, workers with Azure skills are in high demand. According to Dice’s data, the value of Azure skills has jumped 79 percent over the last year; workers with this skill report an average salary of $110,707 per year.
Businesses are embracing the cloud, but that means they need more qualified workers to help manage those cloud services. Salaries for this generalized-skill are up 35 percent, slightly lower than other skills on this list, but it makes sense since it’s been a hot skill for quite a few years now. Still, workers with cloud skills report an average yearly salary of $112,972, making it a valuable skill for tech employees to add to their resume.