If you have the right tech skills, you can command a great -- and maybe even a fantastic -- salary.
But it's an ever-changing target. One day a skill is hot and the next it's not.
We asked job site Indeed.com to tell us which skills will command a salary of at least $100,000 a year. And that's just salary -- a new job might also net you bonuses, stock options and the like.
Indeed is one of the biggest job search sites on the 'net with 1.5 billion job searches per month. It sifted through its massive database of job titles and descriptions and the salaries associated with them to come up with this list.
And you are going to be surprised, because it's not all about the latest, greatest new thing. Sometimes an older technology is still in demand, with companies competing heavily for people who can still do the task.
No. 10: Unified Modeling Language (UML) is worth at least $101,000
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously said that "software is eating the world." He meant that more of our world depends on software.
As that happens, the software itself grows really complicated. Enter the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This is is a visual language for constructing, and documenting complex software designs. It turns a complicated software process into a diagram.
No. 9: J2EE is worth at least $102,000
J2EE stands for the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition, though in version 5, the name was officially changed to Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE). People still refer to it as J2EE though.
Whatever you call it, it is is Oracle's enterprise Java computing platform, meaning it is software that let's developers run Java applications. Java is highly popular language for writing web apps and custom enterprise apps.
No. 8: PowerBuilder is worth at least $102,000
Sybase
Sue Dunnell, Powerbuilder product manager
PowerBuilder is a software development tool owned by Sybase and used to develop custom Windows enterprise apps.
It is particularly used to develop Web apps on Microsoft's .Net platform.
It is known for building apps that tap into databases from Microsoft, Oracle and Sybase. PowerBuilder is an older tool, first released in the 1990's. Most young developers are more interested in a platform that competes with .Net, Java. So finding .Net experts, and PowerBuilder pros, has become harder to do.
No 7: Hadoop is worth at least $103,000.
Hadoop is a super hot up-and-coming "big data" technology.
Hadoop is open source software used to gather and store vast amounts of data and analyze it on low-cost commodity hardware. For instance, banks may use Hadoop for fraud detection, online shopping services for analyzing customers buying patterns.
Although Hadoop itself is an open source project, there are a few companies that have commercial versions of it including Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR.
In addition, jobs asking for "big data" skills, pay slightly more: $106,000. Big data includes a number of tech skills including Hadoop, NoSQL databases, analytics and others.
No 6: Silverlight is worth at least $103,000
Microsoft's Scott Guthrie won't come right and talk about Silverlight's future. But the skill is still in demand today.
This one is a surprise.
Silverlight is a Microsoft technology for creating rich media apps for the Web. It's Microsoft's alternative to Adobe Flash.
If you don't already have Silverlight skills, don't kill yourself to get them. Although Microsoft won't formally admit it, Silverlight's lifespan is limited. Microsoft has thrown its support behind the up-and-coming HTML5 standard. Windows 8 style apps don't support Silverlight.
However, there are a lot of companies that have Silverlight apps that need tending to. And there's a dwindling number of developers who know Silverlight, so it's a nice specialty to advertise, if you happen to have it.
No. 5: CISSP certification is worth $103,000
Etebarren
Computer security is complicated and not getting any easier.
IT professionals with security certifications are in demand by just about every enterprise on the planet.
The International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, Inc. -- which calls itself (ISC)² for short -- offers one of the most respected security certifications. This is the CISSP or the Certified Information Systems Security Professional.
It is a top-tier certification and candidates can't obtain it until they've logged five+ years as a security professional. But once you get it, it is good for jobs worldwide.
No. 4: Erlang is worth $107,000
This is another surprise. Erlang is a really old computer programming created by Ericsson to support applications in demanding can't-go-down environments like e-commerce apps.
In 1998, Ericsson released it as an open source language and its popularity grew from there. Thanks to trends like cloud computing and big data, Erlang is making a come back, since its good for tasks that require dealing with a lot of spread-out systems (distributing computing) that can't go down.
No. 3: Clojure is worth $108,000
Clojure -- pronounced "closure" -- is a modern version of a very old computer language known as Lisp which hails from 1958.
Clojure is much more recent -- it arrived on the scene in about 2007, when its inventor, Rich Hickey, released it. It's become popular because it works with the Java Virtual Machine, used by web browsers. It's good for writing really complicated web apps that support lots of concurrent users.
No. 2: PMP certification is worth $108,000
PMI's Project Management Professional is probably the most universally recognized certification for project managers.
This is a higher level cert. You can't take it until you can document that you've got at least 4,500 hours worth of project management experience under your belt. And once you get it, you've got to work hard in the field to keep it.
Although it not an IT-specific cert, it's the one most IT project managers get, and most IT employers want.
No 1: PeopleSoft is worth $110,000
PeopleSoft is a human resources application that was acquired by Oracle in 2005 in one of the most bitter hostile takeovers in software history.
The founders of PeopleSoft turned around and founded a cloud competitor, Workday, and then tried to nab PeopleSoft customers away from Oracle as their contracts came up for renewal. Not every corporate customer ditched Oracle and the Oracle sales machine kicked in. Oracle says it added 350 more PeopleSoft customers in 2011 alone.
So this is another case where demand for IT people who can manage PeopleSoft apps is way higher than the number of IT people around who know the app
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