If you’re in the IT industry and possess niche skills, expect to get 25% more pay than your colleagues

If you’re in the IT industry and an expert at coding and other niche tech skills, it’s time to see your salary account swell this financial year. Salary hikes for specialised skills are expected to be more than double the wage increase for an average employee this year, as the top IT players increasingly move to retain and reward expertise over scale.

According to a news report in The Economic Times, HR experts are of the opinion that a top performer who has the right mix of technology and domain skills can expect more than double the average hike, going up to about 25% or even higher in some cases. Most of the employees in the IT sector will have to be contended with 8-10% salary hike on an average this year.

Niche skills and domain expertise will rule the roost in this sector, which wasn’t a trend of the past. Many techies unsatisfied with their salaries have approached the management earlier. But this hike in salary will definitely be a game changer to retain the top talents in technology industry.

Even as social, mobility, analytics and cloud ( SMAC) and big data skills continue to take centre stage in the IT sector, dynamically changing customer demands require that the average IT professional knows more than just writing code in a programming language, ET said.
While SAP professionals and coders with knowledge of Adobe Flash Lite, Python and Objective C are on demand, people who can build mobile apps for different platforms are the most sought after. Equally important are big data scientists who can make sense of the massive amounts of data, and people who can help with quality analysis and testing of the developed solutions, according to the financial daily. Experts expect the average salary hike in application services companies may be 9.4% this year.

"Companies have no choice but to give double or more than double the average hike to those who constantly upgrade their skills and domain expertise. They command 30-50% premium in the market," Anuraag Gupta, chief executive at staffing company Magna Infotech has told the ET.

(Image: Reuters)