Open Source Skills Continue to Have Clout in the Job Market

Career site Dice.com is out with results from its 2013-2012 Salary Survey, which confirms that times are getting much better for people seeking technology-focused jobs. And, in particular, the results reflect a trend that we saw gaining pace last year, which is that skills with open source platforms and tools can greatly increase your likelihood of getting hired and commanding a top salary. Here is more on what Dice found.

"Technology salaries in the U.S. saw the biggest jump in more than a decade, according to the 2013-2012 Salary Survey from Dice, the leading career site for technology and engineer professionals," said Dice's announcement, which added:

"Out of the big three, mobile, cloud and data, there’s one that is having a disproportionate impact on salaries – it’s big data.   Salaries reported by those who regularly use Hadoop, NoSQL, and Mongo DB are all north of $100,000.  By comparison, average salaries for technologies closely associated with cloud and virtualization are just under $90,000 and mobile salaries are closer to $80,000."

As we reported in this post, jobs in Big Data are indeed commanding large salaries, and Hadoop skills are particularly good to have in this arena. Hadoop, of course, is a key Big Data-crunching platform, and is open source.

PC World has also reported on the Dice.com data, and notes:

"Rather than a 5 percent increase in average salaries over the past year, those among professionals who regularly use Linux leaped a full 9 percent to $90,853."

Indeed, salaries for workers with Linux skills have been increasing for several years running, a trend that can only continue as Linux makes inroads in businesses and on popular devices.

If you're in the market for a tech job, you can find more from Dice here, including how job prospects look state-by-state in the United States.