Recent Survey: AWS Tops the List of High-Paying Software Skills. According to a new report, businesses are willing to pay top dollar for workers who have expertise in Amazon Web Services (AWS). NovelAspect, a provider managed cloud services, recently analyzed job listings on Indeed.com to identify the most sought-after and lucrative IT skills. The company looked at listings for jobs in the 50 largest U.S. cities, from Oct. 5 to Oct. 12. NovelAspect found that AWS skills are the most lucrative jobs. In a blog post, the company stated that “ten of the top 20 highest-paying skills in software [were] related] to applications produced by Amazon Web Services (AWS), while the top eight on this listing were all AWS products.” NovelAspect claims that DynamoDB, AWS’ NoSQL database product is the highest-paying skill, earning an average annual salary $141,813. The skills that earned the highest salaries in NovelAspect’s study are (in alphabetical order):
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  • Amazon Elastic MapReduce has an average salary $136,250
  • AWS CloudFormation, $132 308
  • Amazon ElastiCache, $125 625
  • Amazon CloudWatch, $121,980
  • AWS Lambda, $121,481
  • Amazon Kinesis, $121,429
  • AWS Key Management Service, $117.297
  • Apache Kafka, $117,234
  • OpenStack, $116,605
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk, $114 219
  • Amazon Redshift, $113.950

NovelAspect also noted that the findings show the importance of cloud-based expertise. Employers ranked “cloud services” as the third most sought-after skill category, with nearly 12 percent of all job listings NovelAspect analyzed. This is only behind skills related to “accounting, spreadsheets” or “database management system”, which each accounted for around 18% of all listings. It’s not surprising that AWS skills translate into higher salaries. According to Dice.com’s earlier this year report, the demand for skilled workers on the most popular public cloud platform is rising dramatically. It also noted a 76 per cent increase in AWS-related job listings from 2015 to 2016.