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Report: Cybersecurity Analysts Claim Biggest Annual Salary Growth
According to a newly released salary report by employment firm Dice, cybersecurity analysts saw an average growth in salary of 16.3 percent (for an average annual salary of $103,106) between 2019 and 2020.
In Dice's annual report, which surveyed 9,143 IT pros and job creators, the entire U.S. tech market saw an annual growth of 3.6 percent in salaries to average $97,859. This counters overall organizational salary spending, as many businesses put in salary freezes due to the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
"These organizations needed skilled technologists capable of everything from digital transformation (including moving on-premises tech stacks to the cloud) to ensuring that infrastructure was secure against a rising number of cyberattacks," read the report.
It wasn't just cybersecurity analysts that saw a healthy bump in their take-home pay. Data scientists saw an average pay increase of 12.8 percent, DevOps engineer salaries increased 12.2 percent and technical support engineers' salaries jumped up 12.2 percent.
According to Dice, the top five best paying tech jobs were:
- IT management (CEO, CIO, CTO, VP, Director), with an average salary of $143,146 (decrease of 1.7 percent).
- System architect, with an average salary of $140,658 (increase of 1.7 percent).
- Cloud engineer, with an average salary of $136,479 (increase of 6.3 percent).
- Cybersecurity engineer, with an average salary of $134,340 (increase of 4.3 percent).
- Data architect, with an average salary of $133,064 (increase of 3.2 percent).
Dice attributes the dramatic increase of cloud engineer salaries to both the increase in continued cloud adoption and the sudden shift to remote work.
Skills that Pay
This year's annual survey found that those with technical skills associated with Big Data continue to be in high demand, and have seen their paychecks increase over the past few years. If you have RabbitMQ experience, your paycheck increased by an average of 10.1 percent over the last year, making it the most profitable skill to have (with an average salary of $136,151) and the biggest jump in salary increase.
"In 2020, the need for fast, accurate data analysis only became more important, and those technologists well-versed in all things related to Big Data found their skills earning a premium salary," read the report.
The other top skills include: MapReduce, Mockito, service-oriented architecture, PaaS, Cloudera, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, Cassandra and Elasticsearch.
As for programming languages, those with experience with TensorFlow, Golang, Scala, KornShell and Perl are at the top of the compensation list.
Top Tech Hotspots
While Silicon Valley still continues to have the best-paid tech jobs in the country (with an average of $126,801, an increase of 2.4 percent), this year's fastest-growing cities are Charlotte, N.C. (increase of 13.8 percent), Orlando, Fla. (13.4 percent), Detroit, Mich. (7.7 percent), and Houston, Texas (7.1 percent). Dice said that these areas have recently seen an injection of both tech investment and young talent:
All four cities have attracted startups fueled by venture capital, which compete with well-established local industries (such as oil and gas in Houston, automobiles in Detroit) for the best tech talent. Incorporate a steady pipeline of young technologists thanks to regional universities, and you have a recipe for robust tech scenes.
Pulling back a bit, New Jersey tops the list of states with the highest tech salaries with an average of $111,233. And, thanks to its salary increase of 8.7 percent for the year, the Garden State took the top spot for highest paying tech jobs from California.