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SOA skills draw top salaries: Dice survey

IT jobs with a strong Java emphasis draw the highest premium, latest survey shows.
Written by Joe McKendrick, Contributing Writer

Service-oriented architecture was the second-highest-paying skillset on a list of 84 tech skills covered in Dice's latest IT salary survey.

The average annual salary for professionals working with SOA now stands at $108,210, up 6.3% from last year's average of $101,827. The highest-paying skillset is ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming for SAP environments), drawing an average of $109,157 a year, 3.1% more than $105,887 last year.

By metro areas, Silicon Valley paid top dollar to IT professionals (all  skills and ranks), averaging $104,195 a year, up 5.2% over last year's $99,028. The Washington D.C./Baltimore area follows at $94,317, and Seattle at $90,362.

Dice also reports that technology professionals enjoyed their largest annual salary growth since 2008. After two straight years of wages remaining nearly flat, tech professionals on average garnered salary increases of more than 2%, boosting their average annual wage to $81,327 from $79,384 in 2010.

A more considerable jump was noted in both size of average bonuses, up 8% to $8,769, and the number of technology professionals receiving bonuses: 32% in 2011, compared with 29% in 2010 and 24% in 2009. The industries most likely to pay out bonuses: telecom, hardware, banking, utilities/energy and software.

Here are the skills that commanded six-figure salaries and had above average year/year growth:

  • ABAP – Advanced Business Application Programming: $109,157  (+3%)
  • SOA – Service Oriented Architecture:  $108,210   (+6%)
  • ETL – Extract Transform and Load:  $106,521   (+6%)
  • WebLogic:  $103,702   (+5%)
  • JDBC – Java Database Connectivity:  $102,630   (+5%)
  • UML – Unified Modeling Language:  $102,579   (+6%)
  • JBoss:  $102,184   (+5%)
  • WebSphere:  $100,348   (+7%)

As Alice Hill, managing director for Dice put it: "This looks like a push towards enterprise Java — with WebSphere, JBoss and WebLogic showing outsized gains. Not to mention, a continuation of the trends we’ve seen toward tech professionals helping their companies gain more insight into their cost structures, customer behavior and emerging trends."

The Dice salary survey was administered online with 18,325 employed technology professionals responding between September 19 and November 21, 2011.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons.)

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