Hot IT skills that will get you hired and well-paid

Tech skills are the future of business, as each corner of the enterprise depends on technology in some fashion to meet goals and objectives. With those skills come the promise of more money and job security. But the question remains: Which skills are worth your investment in time and resources? Talk of DevOps, big data, cybersecurity and other IT skills fill the ether, but how do they stack up in the real world? We spoke with Dice.com to find the answer as well as look at the IT job market as a whole

One of the best predictors of what’s to come is to look at the past. So with the first quarter of 2015 almost behind us, we look back to see what’s going on within the tech jobs market and which skills have grown in demand over the past year. This list represents the fastest-growing skills on a year-over-year basis. These are the skills that have seen the biggest growth, from a job-postings perspective.

This should be no surprise to anyone working in technology. Between all the recent hacks and the growth of the Internet of Things, security will become increasingly important. In fact, according to Gartner, 4.9 billion “things” will be connected to the Internet this year up 30 percent from 2014.

According to data from Computerworld’s annual Forecast survey of IT, security spending is top of mind with respondents and also tops the list when it comes to 2015 IT budgeting, “Nearly half (46 percent) of the IT leaders who responded to our poll said that they will invest more next year in access control, intrusion prevention, identity management, and virus and malware protection.”

Puppet is an open source tool used to automate many of the tasks sysadmins perform manually, which many believe is the only way to handle the ever-increasing infrastructures needed to compete in a global market. This type of technology then frees up SysAdmins to perform tasks that will drive better value for their organization. “It has gained a foothold with some of tech’s biggest players, and Puppet Labs completed a $40 million round of investment funding in mid-June,” Dice.com President Shravan Goli said in a report last September. Job listings for this skill have increased 66 percent year over year.

Even as many organizations struggle to make big data work for them, interest and demand for talent continues to grow. Data-based decision-making, most would agree, will drive business and if you can extract actionable and usable information from the ever-growing sources of data available, this is your time.

Apache Hadoop allows for the storing and processing big data sets across clusters of commodity servers. What makes Hadoop so popular is its capability to parse almost any kind of data quickly and with a high tolerance for fault, handling failures in the application layer.

Hadoop skills are is in high demand by employers looking to get the most of their big data. According to Dice, demand for people with Hadoop skills has increased 48 percent year over year.

NoSQL databases are used primarily in big data and real-time Web apps. It allows for the storage and reclamation of data in a more scalable, flexible and simple way than traditional relational databases. This approach has been picking up pace in the marketplace and Dice expects that to continue. Over the last year, demand for this skill has increased 40 percent.

Adoption of cloud technologies has increased dramatically. According to this PCWorld article and data from Rackspace, nearly 90 percent of all business now have adopted the cloud in one form or another and thanks to easy scalability and overall cost savings this trend will likely continue. That’s good news for those IT pros with cloud skills. Jobs requiring these skills have grown an impressive 35 percent and as we get deeper into cloud adoption we’ll soon start seeing parts of the application layer making into the cloud.

Python has been around for more than 20 years. Created and maintained by Dutch computer programmer Guido van Rossum, it’s revered for its ease of use and well-designed syntax and for years has found itself in the top 10 of the TIOBE Programming Community index. Demand for IT pros with Python skills has increased a respectable 31 percent over last year.

DevOps is so top of mind these days that you’d expect to see it here, but not according to Dice’s numbers. Demand for skilled workers with waterfall experience has increased 23 percent year over year The waterfall method of software design unlike DevOps is one in which progress flows downward through the development process — conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing, production/implementation and maintenance.

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM system used to store customer data and is capable of helping organizations improve the sales process. It’s used by companies of all sizes to enhance sales leads, opportunities and campaigns.

According to a recent Gartner data, it’s the leading CRM software provider holding 16 percent of the market share. There were more than a 1,000 job listings on Dice at the time of writing this report. That’s a 17-percent increase over the prior year’s numbers.

So many of the skills on this list are related to big data that we thought it was worth looking at average salaries for people with experience in these areas.