Hot IT skills that will get you hired and well-paid

Tech skills are the future of business, as each corner of the enterprise depends on technology in some fashion to meet goals and objectives. With those skills come the promise of more money and job security. But the question remains: Which skills are worth your investment in time and resources? Talk of DevOps, big data, cybersecurity and other IT skills fill the ether, but how do they stack up in the real world? We spoke with Dice.com to find the answer as well as look at the IT job market as a whole

One of the best predictors of what’s to come is to look at the past. So with the first quarter of 2015 almost behind us, we look back to see what’s going on within the tech jobs market and which skills have grown in demand over the past year. This list represents the fastest-growing skills on a year-over-year basis. These are the skills that have seen the biggest growth, from a job-postings perspective.

This should be no surprise to anyone working in technology. Between all the recent hacks and the growth of the Internet of Things, security will become increasingly important. In fact, according to Gartner, 4.9 billion “things” will be connected to the Internet this year up 30 percent from 2014.

According to data from Computerworld’s annual Forecast survey of IT, security spending is top of mind with respondents and also tops the list when it comes to 2015 IT budgeting, “Nearly half (46 percent) of the IT leaders who responded to our poll said that they will invest more next year in access control, intrusion prevention, identity management, and virus and malware protection.”

Puppet is an open source tool used to automate many of the tasks sysadmins perform manually, which many believe is the only way to handle the ever-increasing infrastructures needed to compete in a global market. This type of technology then frees up SysAdmins to perform tasks that will drive better value for their organization. “It has gained a foothold with some of tech’s biggest players, and Puppet Labs completed a $40 million round of investment funding in mid-June,” Dice.com President Shravan Goli said in a report last September. Job listings for this skill have increased 66 percent year over year.

Even as many organizations struggle to make big data work for them, interest and demand for talent continues to grow. Data-based decision-making, most would agree, will drive business and if you can extract actionable and usable information from the ever-growing sources of data available, this is your time.