Without a doubt, data analytics and app building skills are some of the hottest, most in-demand skills sought by employers today. As well, JavaScript, C# and other program platforms and skill sets have widespread appeal and continue to be quite popular. But if you look a little deeper, you’ll find a group of lesser-known skills that are gaining momentum and popularity with employers.
Dice recently analyzed its online job postings and identified tech skills that have skyrocketed in terms of demand. These skill sets are becoming vitally important for industries ranging from marketing to analytics. According to Dice, between 2013 and 2014, employers asked for the following skills with increasing frequency, and if you rank the skills by number of job postings in which they appear, a few jumped by more than 2,000 positions.
Ten Skills on the Fast Track
Click through for the 10 fastest-trending IT skills on Dice.
Cloudera Impala
Average salary: $139,874
Ranks climbed: 2,593
Cloudera Impala is a fully integrated, state-of-the-art analytic database architected specifically to leverage the flexibility and scalability strengths of Hadoop – combining the familiar SQL support and multi-user performance of a traditional analytic database with the rock-solid foundation of open source Apache Hadoop and the production-grade security and management extensions of Cloudera Enterprise.
Adobe Experience Manager
Average salary: $123,599
Ranks climbed: 2,559
Adobe Experience Manager is a comprehensive solution for building websites, mobile apps and forms. It’s popular with marketing and advertising agencies because you can create and manage digital experiences across responsive websites, mobile sites and on-site screens that are global, yet relevant and engaging.
Ansible
Average salary: $124,860
Ranks climbed: 2,532
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs. Being designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time. It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy — and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allows you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.
Xamarin
Average salary: $101,707
Ranks climbed: 1,991
The Xamarin platform allows mobile developers to build apps in a shared C# codebase that can be shared across all platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. Anything you can do in Objective-C, Swift or Java, you can do in C#. Apps are built with standard, native user interface controls, so they look and act the way end users expect. You can test for bugs and monitor app performance in real time.
OnCue
Average salary: $125,067
Ranks climbed: 1,981
While video streaming is big, it remains to be seen whether this web-based TV service, currently owned by Verizon, will continue to hold a spot in Dice’s Top 10 List.
Laravel
Average salary: $96,219
Ranks climbed: 1,917
Laravel is one of the more popular open-source PHP Web application frameworks. With growing interest on tech social channels like Github, usage and demand for this skill should only increase.
RStudio
Average salary: $117,257
Ranks climbed: 1,912
RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R. It includes a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution, as well as tools for plotting, history, debugging and workspace management.
Unified Functional Testing
Average salary: $102,419
Ranks climbed: 1,892
Hewlett-Packard’s Unified Functional Testing platform gives tech pros the ability to comprehensively test software platforms and ecosystems; it’s also Windows-centric, which dovetails perfectly with most office environments.
Object Pascal
Average salary: $77,907
Ranks climbed: 1,889
Although Pascal has been around for 45 years, it’s still very much in use, with a subset of job postings on Dice.com for candidates who have experience with Object Pascal (a well-known derivative).
Apache Kafka
Average salary: $134,950
Ranks climbed: 1,798
Apache Kafka is an open-source tool developed by the Apache Software Foundation for maintaining real-time data feeds, capable of handling hundreds of megabytes of writes and reads per second from thousands of clients. Kafka’s cluster-centric design, with an emphasis on fault-tolerance and durability, makes it a favorite among an expanding subset of developers.
