3 out of 5 highest paid jobs require big data and cloud computing skills. For professionals aiming to earn biggest bucks in the fastest growing industry, they need to become big data experts. The root of tech innovation in Silicon Valley startups and other well-established companies across the world are opening up high paid big data jobs for IT professionals. People who know how to handle, process and analyse big data can be assured to get the heaviest paychecks in 2015.Here is the list of top 15 big data and cloud computing skills professionals need to master to cash in rewarding big data and cloud computing jobs.

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A big data research report by IDG Enterprise found that increasing number of enterprises plan to invest in big data skills in the next 12 to 18 months which paves way for several big data jobs for each role as listed below-

Business analysts (21%)

Data scientists (27%)

Research analysts (21%)

Data Architects (24%)

Data Visualizers (23%)

Data Analysts (24%)

"Big data skills are just too critical for staying competitive. They’ve expanded in popularity from a few industries to nearly every industry and market. CIOs are looking for software engineers who can think beyond what they're doing today and for business analysts who can predict what customers will want next year and the year after that. The demand for outside-the-box thinkers with hybrid skills is not going away."- said David Foote, Principal Analyst at Foote Partners.

It is no secret that the IT industry pays well but the only concern for professionals is the ever changing job market. To maintain a competitive edge in the market, organizations, strives to maintain IT staff that is well-honed with the latest tools and technologies so that they business does not suffer from skills gap. The top hiring technology trends for 2015 consists of boom for big data, organizations embracing cloud computing and need for IT security. Yes, you read it right -cloud based big data applications have increased demand for professionals with exemplary big data skills.

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Big data and Cloud computing are on the top list of concerns faced by CIO’s to address the changing customer requirements.

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Dice survey found that there will be a significant 46% increase in job opportunities for IT professionals with cloud and big data skills.With increasing number of companies struggling in the battle - to make the best use of big data for maximizing their profitability through analytics, CIO’s are willing to pay big bucks for IT professionals who can analyse huge datasets and provide the enterprise with actionable intelligence.

“Companies are betting big that harnessing data can play a major role in their competitive plans and is leading to high pay for critical skills.”-said Mr Shravan Goli, President of Dice.

According to Dice.com’s salary survey report of 2014, professionals with cloud and big data skills grabbed the best paychecks in the US.

Big Data and Cloud Computing Skills

Wondering, what are those cloud and big data skills that will help you earn those big salaries for big data and cloud computing jobs? We have gathered the list of top 15 cloud and big data skills that offer high paying big data and cloud computing jobs which fall between $120K to $130K-

1) Apache Hadoop - Average Salary $121,313

According to Dice, the pay for big data jobs for expertise in hadoop skills has increased by 11.6% from the last year. Hadoop is at the centre of big data applications and is the up-and-coming big data skill of 2015. The open source platform has caught the attention of several big data projects across the world.Commercial Hadoop distributions by popular Hadoop vendors like –MapR, Hortonworks and Cloudera have rapidly growing customer bases. Thus, there is an increased demand for professionals with Hadoop skills across consulting, corporate IT and service provider landscape. A big-data resume with Hadoop skills highlighted on the list will attract employer’s attention immediately.

2) NoSQL Databases -Average Salary$118,587

If on one side of the big data virtuous cycle is Hadoop, then the other is occupied by NoSQL databases. Professionals capable of administering new-fangled data stress based on documents, graphs and other formats are in great demand across the industry.

According to Dice, the number of big data jobs for professionals with experience in a NoSQL databases like  MongoDB, Cassandra and HBase has increased by 54% since last year.

The big data phenomenon is just incomplete without the use of popular NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase Neo4j, CouchDB, Riak and Redis. NoSQL database systems are developed to handle huge unstructured datasets across various commodity servers with no single point of failure.

As per the industry survey reports, the pay for professionals with NoSQL database skills has increased by 3.3% from the previous year.

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3) Java - Average Salary $114,234

Java is a popular application programming language that has several other tech skills associated with it like Hadoop and Python. The demand for the old standby Java is at an all time high when combined with other big data technologies. According to dice, the number of job opportunities for professionals with Java skills has increased by 11% over the last year.

4) Python -Average Salary $100,717

Python programming is the most sought after skill as big data, Cloud and mobile platform collaborate to new levels. Professionals with Python in their skill set cover a great deal than merely big data - because expertise in Python can be applied to a broad range of job roles and it is not only confined to big data jobs. Python is by far the most in-demand big data skills with close to 5818 job listings on Dice as of June 10 ^th, 2015.

Python developers can code for big data and other cloud based services. The demand for professional’s expertise in Python is increasing exponentially due to the simplicity and selection of large data processing libraries that can be applied to various web services. According to Dice, the number of job opportunities for Python professionals has increased by 19% over the last year.

5) Ruby on Rails- Average Salary $109,460

Ruby will add to the crown jewel of your big data resume as most of the big data projects run on agile software development methodology to fulfil changing customer requirements. RoR has become one of the popular web application frameworks with eBay, Twitter and Slideshare enjoying the benefits of their investment on RoR developers. Even medium and small scale enterprises are on the verge of adopting RoR framework creating increasing demand for IT professionals.

6) UML- Average Salary$114,372

Unified Modelling Language abbreviated as UML is the most sought after skill for big data project management. With increasing demand for developing big data applications that users can understand, it is essential to capture the user’s language in a diagram to ease the complexity of the complicated software process design. According to Dice, the salaries for professionals with UML in their skill set have increased by 6.5% than the previous year.

7) PaaS - Average Salary $130,081

According to a research report by 451 Group - “PaaS will most likely survive as a category, but not necessarily as we know it today.” “Platform as a Service” abbreviated as PaaS is a cloud computing technology that hosts everything a programmer needs for writing applications. The applications are hosted on PaaS cloud. PaaS is in high demand with every big data vendor, every app developer and every hosting company switching over to the PaaS market.

Increasing number of big data applications are deployed on top of PaaS clouds as customers can develop, run and manage big data applications on the cloud without having to build or maintain a new infrastructure.

8) MapReduce - Average Salary $127,315

MapReduce associated with the big data boom is at the heart of the tiny elephant  “Hadoop” for generating and processing huge data sets on a Hadoop cluster. MapReduce is used for statistical machine translations, machine learning and web access log stats. To draw meaningful business insights from Hadoop, an IT professional must be proficient in writing software programs for MapReduce. According to Dice, there is a significant 11% increase in paychecks for big data jobs associated with MapReduce.

9) R Programming Language- Average Salary$115,121

Big data is all about statistical and quantitative reasoning, having expertise in R will allow professionals to apply for Data Scientist job role as well- provided they have other skills listed on their big data resume required for the job. Organizations that were earlier dependent on legacy systems for statistical analysis are on the verge of adopting a new open source alternative R. Till date; R programming language has been used by nearly 2 million statisticians and data scientist across the globe. R programming language is used extensively to gather business intelligence from big data. R programming has applications in Genetics, Computer Science, Healthcare, Artificial Intelligence and Bio Chemistry. With close to 4000 packages available for developers, R adopts novel machine learning and statistical techniques making it the hottest tech skill for statisticians and data scientists.

10) Sqoop - Average Salary $114,328

Big data is driving popularity for the Hadoop based tool, Sqoop- that performs various big data operations like –

• Data transformations in Hive data warehouse
• Extracting big data from Hadoop and vice-versa
• Sqoop performs Pig based analytics on the big data stored in HDFS.

With Sqoop having the ability to bring mainframe data into the Hadoop cluster for processing, the demand for this skill is increasing among enterprises that are transitioning from legacy systems to new technologies. According to Dice, there is 24.5% increase in paychecks for professionals with Sqoop listed in their set of big data skills expertise.

11) CloudStack - Average Salary$115,043

CloudStack, a cloud operated platform for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has close to $1 billion worth of business transactions running across various clouds on the commercial version released by Citrix. According to a Dice survey there is 24% increase in the pay for cloud computing jobs associated will CloudStack skill.

12) Apache Flume - Average Salary$123,186

Flume is another spawning technology of the big data world that helps businesses collect, aggregate and move large amount of log data. Flume has gained huge demand because of its ability to move big data into Hadoop clusters for big data deployments.

13)Tableau -Average Salary $102,000

Big data can be difficult to comprehend, however in certain circumstances data visualization can be the key to success. With increasing volume of Big Data, there is need for professionals to learn business intelligence tools like Tableau that helps them integrate all the reports, analyse the data and represent data in a visual form. Tableau can help you explore a sample of your big data and tell you the shape of you data or any other hidden details before you proceed with deep analytics. Tableau makes it easy for developers to share analytics in the cloud. To excel in the big data world, being well-versed with a data visualization tool like Tableau is a must.

14) Chef-Average Salary$123,458

A configuration management tool that helps administrators ease the process of managing servers efficiently. Chef can be integrated with various public cloud systems like Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, OpenStack and Google Cloud Platform for automating server tasks. 

A quick search on Dice for the keyword “Chef” showed close to 1367 cloud computing jobs listed for the popular tech trend DevOps skill chef.

15) Apache Pig- Average Salary $124,563

Apache Pig, popular for its capability to analyse huge data sets with optimization opportunities and extensibility.Most enterprises are looking for professionals who are well-versed in working with Apache Pig to leverage business analytics efficiently. Pig is a programming language that helps find answers to certain questions from Hadoop clusters using big data. A survey by Dice found that there is 13% increase in paychecks over last year for professionals with Pig on their list of big data skillss expertise.

IT professionals with the above mentioned in-demand cloud and big data skills will get to hear about novel job opportunities from top employers looking to achieve their business analytics goal. IT professionals with cloud and big data skills will continue to command big salaries over the years to come with increasing demand for the right big data talent.

"Knowing a hot [area] can bolster your job-hunting fortunes and give you an edge in salary negotiations.”- said David Foote

Big Data is here to stay and knowing cloud and big data skills that can help with Big Data analysis will open up a plethora of  big data and cloud computing job opportunities. It is time to strike the iron while it is hot and learn some of these cloud and big data skills to pursue a lucrative career in big data and cloud computing. Get cracking!

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