Ten IT Skills on the Fast Track

Here are the 10 fastest-growing tech skills compiled by Dice.com for this year.  Referencing data from the nearly 80,000 jobs posted on its website on any given day, Dice.com has identified the top 10 big movers year-over-year, skills-wise, based on mentions in job postings. To be considered, skill requests had to appear in at least 1,000 job postings on a given day to qualify. Given how much media attention has been focused on data breaches lately, it's not at all surprising to see cybersecurity as one of the leading contenders. It's also no surprise to see Big Data and other data-related skills leading the pack. After all, data is the life-blood of business.

1. Puppet
The open source IT automation tool of the moment is anything but child's play. It has gained a foothold with some of tech's biggest players and Puppet Labs completed a $40 million round of investment funding in mid-June. Dice expects tech professionals with this content management experience to continue to be on hiring managers' wish lists into the future.

2. Cybersecurity 
It's no surprise that two of the top 10 skills on the list (also Information Security) address keeping data secure. As an increasing number of data breaches make headlines and consumer anxiety concerning personal information abounds, organizations' and retailers' need for bench strength when it comes to IT security needs little explanation. Expect demand for this skill to continue to grow as companies look for tech professionals who can both proactively and reactively attend to security gaps.

3. Big Data 
Big Data continues to be an ever-bigger deal across industries ranging from pharma to health care, defense systems to video games. The tech professional who can manipulate this data best stands to collect most in the future.

4. NoSQL 
As mobile apps multiply and Big Data and the cloud gain even greater acceptance, NoSQL databases are picking up speed in the marketplace. Professionals who know when to use (and when not to use) these new approaches will bring much-needed flexibility, efficiency and agility to their companies’ operations.

5. Salesforce
Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., Salesforce is a cloud-based company offering global application support for sales, service, collaboration, marketing, and cloud PaaS. Given their expanding services and easy access, there's little doubt companies will continue looking for Salesforce-familiar tech employees for some time to come.

6. Hadoop 
As more and more businesses seek to analyze and interpret massive amounts of stored information, this open source Apache framework will continue to gain traction. Hiring managers use Dice's Open Web to find Hadoop professionals who also have NoSQL and Big Data experience.

7. JIRA
JIRA is a proprietary issue-tracking product, developed by Atlassian. JIRA can be used to capture and organize issues, assign work, and follow team activity. JIRA integrates with a number of tools to provide baked-in best practices to get from issues to code to deployment seamlessly.

8. Cloud 
A recent survey by Intuit predicts that 78 percent of U.S. small businesses will be fully adopting the cloud by 2020, as compared to 37 percent today. As cloud computing grows, job opportunities should soar as well.

9. Information Security 
As mentioned earlier, data breach threats from inside and outside organizations are growing in number and complexity. With no end in sight for these threats, those well-versed in tech security should have ample opportunity for the foreseeable future.

10. Python
Python is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. It is developed under an OSI-approved open source license, making it freely usable and distributable, even for commercial use.