Value of database skills a mixed bag for IT pros

Skill premiums increase slightly over past 6 months, survey indicates.


Extra pay awarded to IT and data professionals for possessing certified and noncertified IT and business skills—also known as skills pay premiums—rose only slightly for the first half of this year, or compared with one year ago.

According to the latest skills and certification report from Foote Partners, LLC—IT Skills and Certification Pay Index—skills premiums rose on average 1.3 percent in the first six months of 2016, and 3.2 percent in the last six months. Of the 870 skills tracked by Foote Partners, 99 skills made gains in cash market value, and 77 lost value.

While reported gains are not large, the good news is that this is the 13th consecutive quarter that the overall market value has increased for the 405 IT certifications tracked. That is unprecedented in the 18 years that Foote Partners has been tracking such matters. Increases have been driven by hot applications development, database, and messaging and communications skills.



While noncertified database skills gained only 0.2 percent in value in the first quarter of 2016, they are up 4.5 percent from one year ago. Only application development noncertified skills exceed that, at 5 percent.

Among certified skills it’s a different matter. Database skills are down 1 percent in the first quarter of 2016, and 0.6 percent for the year.

So which are the biggest winner and losers in terms of skills pay premiums? Foote Partners says the following database IT certified skills lost more than 10 percent in value in the past year:

• Oracle Certified Professional–MySQL 5 Developer

• Oracle Certified Expert–MySQL 5.1 Cluster Database Administrator

In terms of noncertified skills, there were both winners and losers. Those database skills gaining more than 10 percent in value included:

• SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

• Oracle DB 9i/10g/11i/12c

• Cloudera Impala

• Oracle Application Developer

• Oracle Enterprise Manager

• Amazon RedShift

• Redis

Noncertified database skills losing more than 10 percent in value included:

• TIBCO Spotfire

• Data security

• Master data management

• Base SAS

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