10 Fastest Trending Job Skills in Technology

Are you keeping up with the fastest-trending job skills in technology? Do you know what your staffing needs will be and what positions might be difficult to fill? The 10 fastest-trending job skills in technology could help you stay on course.

Dice, which tracks technology issues, says that pros proficient in data analysis and constructing applications continue to be in high demand. It based its findings on the most sought-after skills in job listings on its site from 2013 to 2014.

Here is the Dice research, with some of our own thrown in for good measure. Remember, this is a list that reflects fastest-growing jobs – not highest paid jobs. Some jobs with lower salaries will be ranked higher because more employers are seeking those specific skills.

1. Cloudera Impala: Average salary: $139,874. As Cloudera explains, Impala is a fully integrated, state-of-the-art analytic database architected specifically to leverage the flexibility and scalability strengths of Hadoop. It’s an open source massively parallel processing (MPP) SQL query engine for data stored in a computer cluster running Hadoop.

2. Adobe Experience Manager: Average salary. $123,599. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an enterprise-grade web content management system with a wide array of features. It a server-side program that runs on the Java SE platform on Windows, Mac or Unix.

3. Ansible: Average salary: $124,860. Ansible is an IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs. It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure. It also uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

4. Xamarin: Average salary: $101,707. Xamarin is a library that exposes a single set of APIs for accessing common mobile device functionality across iOS, Android, and Windows platforms. It currently abstracts the contacts, camera, and geo-location APIs across iOS, Android and Windows platforms.

5. OnCue: Average salary: $125,067. OnCue is a video streaming service owned by Verizon. Dice expresses some doubt that it will maintain its place on a hot-technology list going forward. Its creator is no longer associated with the company.

6. Laravel : Average salary: $96,219. Laravel, like Ansible, is an open source program using a PHP web application framework. It is designed for the development of model–view–controller (MVC) web applications.

7. RStudio: Average salary: $117,257. As RStudio explains on its website, “The technology to amass data has outstripped our abilities to make use of it.” RStudio develops free and open tools for the R community. These include theRStudio development environment as well as the shiny, ggvis, and dplyr packages (among many others).

8. Unified Functional Testing: Average salary: $102,419. This is the Hewlett Packard software formerly known as HP QuickTest Professional. It makes automated testing more efficient and help developers and testers collaborate.

9. Object Pascal: Average salary: $77,907. Maybe this is the lowest salary because Pascal has been around since 1970. According to Wikipedia, it refers to a branch of object-oriented derivatives of Pascal, mostly known as the primary programming language of Embarcadero Delphi. It was first developed at Apple 30 years ago.

10. Apache Kafka: Average salary: $134,950. It may be number 10 on the Dice list, but Apache Kafka commands the second-highest salary behind Cloudera Impala. As Apache explains on its website, Apache Kafka is publish-subscribe messaging rethought as a distributed commit log. Kafka is designed to allow a single cluster to serve as the central data backbone for a large organization. It can be elastically and transparently expanded without downtime.

Dice notes in its blog post, skills rise and fall due to the shifting popularity of platforms and the preferences of influential companies and developers. “Nonetheless, the aforementioned skills deserve tech pros’ attention, as these are the ones that are quickly rising through the ranks and, therefore, continuing to command higher salaries,” the post adds.

Given those words, this list isn’t likely to change much in 2015. But it should make you pay attention to what changes could be coming in 2016.