13 IT skills paying the highest premiums today
As IT jobs grow increasingly complex, there’s more ambiguity surrounding how job titles are defined by any given company and how employers can compensate candidates in the same role with varying skillsets. Pay premiums help employers track the value of specific skills, so they know how competitive the market is for candidates with those skills and how much to offer on top of the base salary.
To keep a finger on the pulse of these premiums, Foote Partners has been tracking pay data on IT skills since 1999 to see which skills and certifications give the biggest boost at any given time. The Foote Partners quarterly IT Skills and Certification Pay Index report uses data provided by 3,602 private- and public-sector employers in U.S. and Canadian cities to track gains and losses in market value and pay premiums for more than 1,000 tech skills and certifications.
On average, market value for 593 non-certified tech skills rose in the second quarter of 2020, with an average pay premium equivalent to just under 10 percent of reported base salary — the highest average premium in 20 years. Meanwhile, more than 500 IT certifications decreased in market value, leading to the widest gap between certified and non-certified IT skills pay premiums since mid-2000, according to Foote Partners.
Several factors impact the fluctuations in pay premiums for non-certified IT skills, including new technology, economic conditions, mergers and acquisitions, employment and economic conditions, budget cycles and changes in recruitment and hiring, according to Foote Partners. And when looking at the data, it’s important to note that a decline in value isn’t always a bad thing; sometimes it can mean that the “market supply of talent for that skill is catching up to demand — not necessarily that demand is starting to wane,” according to Foote Partners. Alternatively, if a skill is in high demand but the supply doesn’t increase to match at the same rate of growth, you will typically see an increase in pay premiums for those specific skills.
Here are 13 non-certified IT skills that gained the most premium pay value in 2020:
DevOps is the combination of software development and operations processes to ensure that your company can improve and deliver quality applications and services by involving both teams in every stage of the development lifecycle. DevSecOps takes that one step further by baking IT security into the development lifecycle, arguing that security should be considered from the earliest steps of any process. As development lifecycles move faster — taking weeks or months rather than years — security has become an integral beginning step to getting secure products and services on the market quickly.
DevSecOps skills are the highest paying non-certified IT skills, earning IT professionals a median 19 percent of their base salary with a reported range of 16 to 21 percent. The premium value of DevSecOps skills grew nearly 6 percent in the past six months, according to data from Foote Partners.
Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that doesn’t require infrastructure and enables users to analyze and query unstructured, semi-structured and structured data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Cloud skills are in high demand as companies rely more heavily on cloud services, such as AWS. That growing demand makes Amazon Athena a valuable and marketable skill for IT pros who have the ability to create and set up and manage Athena databases, tables and partitions.
Amazon Athena skills are the second highest-paying non-certified IT skill, earning IT professionals an average 18 percent of their base salary with a reported range of 16 to 19 percent. Premium value for this skill grew nearly 13 percent over the past six months, according to data from Foote Partners.
Security architecture is an important step in determining how to implement security and the models are the blueprint for that plan.
