As Dice’s latest Tech Salary Survey makes clear, learning highly specialized skills can translate into significant salary bumps for technologists. Anyone plotting their career progression through 2022 and beyond should take a hard look at their job and industry, and consider what they can learn that will separate them from the pack.
Some skills are extraordinarily high paying in comparison to others, and for good reason. These skills are extremely specialized, mastered only by a relative few (at least compared to the millions who learn certain programming languages), and often apply to extraordinarily complicated systems that can take years to learn.
That’s why those (relatively) few technologists who specialize in an enterprise-search platform like Solr ($142,464, up 15.8 percent year-over-year) or Service-Oriented Architecture ($139,961, up 5.1 percent year-over-year) can command such hefty salaries in conjunction with a technologist’s background and experience.
What this list of the top-paying skills makes absolutely clear is that organizations are more than happy to pay a premium for skills related to enterprise-level infrastructure, particularly as it relates to data storage and discovery, and the cloud. Hadoop, HANA and PAAS, for example, have all commanded high salaries for quite some time. Also keep an eye on Tensorflow and neural networks, which could prove key to enterprises in helping to make their infrastructure “smarter.”
Meanwhile, programming skills such as Ruby ($128,689, up 12 percent between 2019 and 2021), JavaScript ($109,833, up 8.9 percent between 2019 and 2021), and Python ($116,498, up 3.9 percent) might not command quite the same salary numbers as certain cloud- and data-related platforms and tools, but they’re equally vital to the operations of businesses large and small, whether it involves maintaining legacy code or building new apps and services.
Learning these languages can translate into a stream of steady (and varied) work, although technologists must take care to keep their knowledge of these individual languages (like any skill) as current as possible. Check out Dice’s Tech Salary Report for even more data on technologist salaries.
