Employment website, Dice.com, released a comprehensive report on salaries in the technology industry. Data was tracked over a 10-year period. The average tech salary increased to $96, 370 annually–up 7.7% from last year. Sixty-two percent of technology professionals saw a salary increase in 2015.
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In a survey conducted of 16,301 employed technology professionals, overall, salary satisfaction rebounded after two years of decline. For the first time, average tech salaries reached the six-figure number in seven metro areas: New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, Baltimore/Washington D.C, Minneapolis, and Portland. Silicon Valley remains the metro area with the highest average tech salary.
IT contractors also had a 5% increase in hourly wages, averaging $70.26 per hour.
The top 10 highest paying tech positions are executive tech management, systems architect, tech management, project manager, MIS manager, security engineer, database administrator, software engineer, application developer, and business analyst.
The top 10 industries paying tech pros the highest salaries are banking/finance/insurance; aerospace and defense; entertainment/media; utilities/energy; professional services (such as staffing, accounting, and legal); computer software; healthcare; telecommunications; computer hardware; and consumer products.
If you want to make the most money of any IT professional you will want to have skills in HANA (High-Performance Analytical Appliance); Cassandra; Cloudera; PaaS; OpenStack, CloudStack; Chef; Pig; MapReduce; or Puppet. These are solutions for Big Data; deploying and managing highly scalable platforms; and/or performing voluminous, high-speed business intelligence. IT pros with skills in these solutions were the highest-paid among those surveyed. Â Businesses increasingly want to crunch and analyze massive amounts of data and build cloud presence.
“As more businesses look to build out their tech infrastructures, employers need solutions to securely store, manage, and process large sets of data,†said Bob Melk, president, Dice.com. “Professionals with big data or cloud expertise continue to serve as high priority candidates. Profitable companies today understand employing tech professionals who understand business goals and strategic priorities are more than employees, they’re partners in achieving success.â€
The entire report is available to download on Dice.com.