Top storage skills to boost your salary

Wanted: Tech pros who know Dell’s Compellent enterprise storage platform

Demand for skilled storage pros is on the rise as enterprise IT teams wrestle with increased storage capacity requirements and evolving business needs. In particular, companies are looking for people with experience migrating from hardware-based storage to cloud storage – and that’s resulting in higher-than-average pay increases, according to Dice.

The tech career hub and job-search site released its annual guide to U.S. tech salaries, which finds that overall average pay in the industry fell slightly last year to $92,081, down from $93,328 in 2015. On the raise front, 61% of tech pros received a salary increase from a year ago, and 9% reported a decrease.

Among all technology segments, the single biggest salary increase, percentage wise, went to tech pros who have experience with Dell’s Compellent enterprise storage platform. Tech pros with Compellent skills earned, on average, $111,457 last year, an increase of 11%, according to Dice's salary research.

Specific to storage, the top-paying tech skills and experience, as ranked by the 2017 Dice Salary Survey, are:

FCoE: $116,145 (7.2% gain compared to prior year)
Compellent (Dell): $111,457 (11.4%)
3Par (HPE): $109,654 (2.8%)
EMC: $109,032 (-0.2%)
Fibre Channel: $108,668 (-0.9%)
Pure Storage: $107,260 (5.3%)
Disaster recovery: $107,260 (2.7%)
Nimble Storage: $ 104,854 (6.1%)
HP Eva: $102,079 (-5.6%)
Hitachi: $103,570 (-3.2%)
NetApp: $103,289 (-3.1%)
SAN: $103,015 (0.9%)
iSCSI: $100,406 (1.1%)
VSAM: $98,568 1.0%)
Box: $98,565 -0.7%)

“Skills that were used a year ago may not be as prominent today; skills that are relevant today will evolve tomorrow. This creates a marketplace where both tech professionals and employers must keep their fingers on the pulse of skills training and demand,” said Bob Melk, president of Dice. “The skills areas which garnered salary increases indicate where professionals and employers should focus their training and recruiting efforts.”

Additional findings in the 2017 Dice Salary Survey include:

Top 10 salary increases across all tech positions: The biggest salary gains, percentage wise, are associated with the following skills: Compellent (11%), Drupal (9%), JCL (7%), FCoE (7%), Nimble (6%), Hbase (6%), MariaDB (5%), Pure Storage (5%), vCloud (5%), and T1 or T3 (5%).

Top 10 highest-paid skills across all tech positions: The biggest salaries are associated with the following skills: HANA $128,958; MapReduce $125,009; Cloud Foundry $124,038; Hbase $123,934; Omnigraffle $123,782; Cassandra $123,459; Apache Kafka $122,728; SOA $122,094; Ansible $121,382; and Jetty $120,978.

Retention factors: Increased compensation is the most common motivator employers provided to tech pros in 2016 (18%), followed by flexible work location and ability to telecommute (14%), more interesting and challenging assignments (12%), and flexible hours (9%).

Tech pros are fairly content: Tech pros remain confident in their career choices, and 54% of those surveyed say they are satisfied with their compensation, up one percentage point from 2015.

Ready to move: 27% of tech pros are more willing to relocate to a new city for a job, up two percentage points from the prior year.

Eyeing new opportunities: 40% of tech pros anticipate changing employers this year. The top drivers are to earn higher compensation (cited by 63%), to seek better working conditions (43%), to gain more responsibility (31%), because they anticipate losing their current position (19%), and to have a shorter commute (16%).

Fear factor: 67% of tech pros remain confident they could find a favorable new position in 2017, but it’s not a worry-free prospect. Finding a relevant position for their skillsets is the biggest concern (cited by 15%), followed by keeping their skills up to date (14%) and position elimination (10%).

The full report is available for download here.

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