Despite an IT job market in flux, demand for certain technical skills has only accelerated. From AI expertise to the hottest programming languages, these 10 skills stand out, according to Dice.
IT has always been known as a lucrative industry for job seekers, with tech professionals earning an average annual salary of $112,521, according to data from the 2025 Dice Tech Salary Report. Tech salaries increased by 2.2% in 2024 and those working in the industry earn 5.7% more than peers in others.
In the past year, several specific skills have taken hold, especially with the rise of AI in business. Those working with AI solutions, whether designing developing, or implementing AI tools, earn salaries that are nearly 18% higher than their peers not working with AI technology, according to Dice. Skills in AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity, programming languages, SaaS, and DevOps can earn a premium salary. So here are the 10聽highest-paying IT skills聽Dice says can help you earn a higher income and land a job in a competitive market.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA)
聽is an architectural framework used for software development that focuses on applications and systems as independent services. Each service is broken down and then categorized by its own specific set of functions into a standardized interface, enabling those services to interact with and access one another. This makes it easier to maintain, update, and monitor services without breaking other parts of the system, or introduce any unnecessary downtime. Having emerged in the late 1990s, SOA is a precursor to microservices but remains a skill that can help ensure software systems remain flexible, scalable, and reusable across the organization.
Average salary:聽$152,026
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene that enables users to store, search, and analyze large data sets in real-time. It鈥檚 become a popular tool for organizations with large amounts of data to sift through, allowing users to quickly search through complex data sets stored across different servers. Elasticsearch is valued as a highly scalable and distributed tool that offers real-time search and analytics, full-text search, geospatial search, and structured search.
Average salary:聽$139,549
Ruby
Ruby is an open-source, object-oriented programming language designed to be simple, readable, and easy to write. Developed in the mid-1990s, Ruby has a reputation for being designed as a productive and fun programming language, with the goal to emphasize human needs in design, rather than computer needs. It鈥檚 primarily used for web development, along with the Ruby on Rails framework, as well as for scripting, automation, DevOps, and data processing.
Average salary:聽$136,920
Apache Kafka
is a powerful tool for real-time data processing and analyzing, using a distributed streaming platform design. Kafka also makes it possible for organizations to handle large data sets, with high throughput and low latency, and provides a scalable and fault-tolerant infrastructure for data streaming. And with Kafka, it鈥檚 possible for several different systems to exchange data in real-time. It鈥檚 a popular tool in finance, telecommunications, and e-commerce, among other industries, and is typically used along with other tools including Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Apache Storm.
Average salary:聽$136,526
Redis
Redis is an open-source data storage and management tool designed to be fast, efficient, and powerful. It enables users to cache and store data, making it quick and easy to access, while also keeping it backed up to a hard drive. As an IT tool, it鈥檚 known for being helpful to manage data structures, handle data in a distributed environment, and offer a high-performance and scalable solution for data storage and caching.
Average salary:聽$136,357
JDBC
Java Database Connectivity skills are necessary for connecting Java applications to databases and ensuring they can be accessed with SQL queries. It鈥檚 a skill most common for java developers, backend engineers, full-stack developers, and database administrators. It鈥檚 also most often used to establish database connectivity, transaction management, connection pooling, exception and metadata handling, result processing, and executing SQL queries.
Average salary:聽$135,486
Containers
Containerization is the process of packaging applications and any associated technologies into a single unit called a container, and ensuring it acts predictably across different environments. Understanding how containers work is a fundamental skill for anyone working in software development, DevOps, cloud computing, and IT operations. Containers help ensure that organizations build reliable, scalable, and consistent applications that will work for end-users on a variety of platforms and systems.
Average salary:聽$135,358
Go
Go, also referred to as Golang, is an open-source programming language developed in 2007 by Google as a to assist in the development of high-level software systems, web applications, and cloud and networking services. It鈥檚 designed to be efficient and easy to use, with simple syntax and features including garbage collection, memory safety, and concurrency support. It鈥檚 become increasingly popular for cloud-based programming due to it being adept at handling parallelism and concurrency. But it鈥檚 also used in distributed systems, web development, ML, and network programming.
Average salary:聽$134,727
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a cloud data warehouse service designed to be fast, scalable, and fully managed for businesses looking to analyze large data sets. It鈥檚 a skill common for data engineers, data analysts, BI developers, software engineers, and cloud architects. Amazon Redshift helps organizations with managing large data sets, SQL and query optimization, integrating AWS services, implementing security and access measures, and designing data modeling and warehousing concepts.
Average salary:聽$143,103
REST
Representational State Transfer is a software architecture style used to design web services, networked applications, and APIs. It鈥檚 known for being simple, scalable, and flexible, allowing backend developers, full-stack developers, cloud engineers, mobile app developers, and DevOps and API engineers to oversell RESTful APIs. It鈥檚 mostly used for designing and developing API backend development, cloud computing, microservices, and web applications.
Average salary:聽$133,970
