Cloud skills continue to rank amongst the most wanted for IT jobs in 2017 but whilst broadly skilled jobs, such as architects, are in high demand, it’s the specialist cloud skills that are drawing in the bigger salaries.
Despite more than 11,000 jobs per day listing cloud computing in their job descriptions, nearly half of all firms feel that most workers lack the advanced skills required, according to a recent survey by CompTIA.
To put that into perspective, findings in the UK Cloud Skills Report 2017 suggests that over 3,500 organisations in the UK will be severely restricted due to a lack of insufficiently cloud-skilled staff. The U.S the picture looks very similar where it is predicted that over 2 million jobs could be left unfilled in manufacturing over the next 10 years due to a lack of people with the right technical skills.
AWS and DevOps are Hot News Right Now
We’re talking about technologies based on DevOps and AWS platforms, or open source platform experience like Cloud Foundary. Of course, you still need to keep your Python, PHP, Perl and .NET skills sharp but adding these advanced skills to your arsenal will certainly open up more interesting, better paying opportunities in cloud computing.
If you’re serious about building a career in the cloud, you would do well by bolstering up your CV with specific certifications and demonstrable experience in specific technologies and languages.
If you’re looking to go deeper into your cloud knowledge – and earn more as a result, here are the most in-demand advanced cloud skills for 2017:
The Highest-Paying Advanced Cloud Skills for 2017
- IaaS – in particular, AWS, Azure, VMware and Rackspace
- Alternative languages such as Ruby on Rails (usage has increased rapidly over the past two years).
- PaaS (adoption of PaaS is increasing, and becoming more innovative).
- DevOps – especially those with automation and configuration management skills. Focus on Ansible, Kornshell, Chef, CFEngine, Capistrano and Zookeeper.
- HTML5
- Apache Hadoop – Data scientists who know Big Data technologies earn 8% more than those who don’t
- SaaS
- Cloud Foundry – the industry’s fastest-growing and most adopted cloud application platform in 2017
Companies rely on professionals who can direct and oversee an organisation’s cloud strategy but, in addition to that, there is a growing need for talented people with a deep understanding of specific applications, and it is those that are seeing the greatest salary increase (up to 7%) compared to between 2% and 5% across the IT industry as a whole (according to the recent Harvey Nash survey).
Take a look at these current cloud computing jobs to see how your skills fit with today’s job requirements. Is it time for you to skill-up and earn more?