By Chelsea Babin

Just last month Dice released their top 10 fastest growing tech skills. Technical professionals familiarize themselves with these lists so they can know which skills to learn and develop further but IT employers may not pay enough attention to this. But, the fact of the matter is, these 10 fastest-growing tech skills are driving salary expectations for IT professionals in a variety of focuses and they’re drastically affecting the current hiring market.

For starters, let’s take a look at the 10 fastest growing technical skills themselves! Juniper, Cassandra, and Hive make up numbers 10, 9, and 8 respectively. At number 7 is Cloud, which is been growing in popularity over a few years now but shows no sign of stopping! Electrical Engineer, while it’s more like a category than a specific technology, comes in at number 6. JIRA, Big Data, and Salesforce make up numbers 5,4, and 3. Azure snagged the number 2 spot and finally, at a whopping 120% growth of mentions in job postings on a year-over-year basis on Dice, Spark, the open-source cluster-computer framework, came in at the number one spot.

A lot of these technologies have to do with Big Data and Cloud, as well as a few frameworks and customer-service oriented technologies. Because these top 10 span a wide variety of IT positions, it’s easy to see why IT salary expectations are increasing across the board. But, if your organization is looking for someone with a strong skill set in any of the 10 fastest growing technologies you may want to make room in the budget for higher salaries.

Or, if you want to get ahead of the technical curve, why not introduce training opportunities at your organization in any of these top 10 swiftly growing technologies? Training opportunities often keep talented employees around longer because they know your organization is a place where they can grow. If you were considering adding training opportunities this year, any of these 10 technologies might be great places to focus on.

Additionally, if you’re searching for IT employees with or without these specialties this year, know that it’s going to be a lengthy, challenging process unless you can go above and beyond in your salary or benefit offerings. After all, according to a recent Stack Overflow survey, over 63% or developers around the world said they’re not actively looking for a job this year. That means, in a talent pool that was already shallow, it’s going to be even more difficult to find the right technical talent to add to your team.