Show me the money! What career choice will land you with the best salary package in IT?

Computing finds out which areas of IT have seen salaries soaring to help you decide whether you want to make the jump into a new role

You may wonder whether you're in the right job, or even on the right career path. And there is always a niggling urge to find out if you could earn more doing something else.

Computing has already helped you figure out whether you're earning what you're worth, and now we're looking at areas of IT in which salaries are soaring - you could potentially make the shift to an area that is red hot at the moment.

The IT sector as a whole

It may be surprising to hear, but as a sector, the average rise in salary is just £882 or a 2.24 per cent increase, which is relatively low compared with the national average pay rise of 3.5 per cent.

General IT sector statistics (CV-Library)

• As a sector, the average rise in salary is £882/2.24%
• July 2014 average salary - £35,161 - £43,463 (mean average £39,312)
• July 2015 average salary - £35,689 - £44,699 (mean average £40,194)

According to job site CV-Library, mid-level roles have seen the highest rise in salary over the past year.

Biggest rises (CV-library) - from July 2014 to July 2015

• IT Product Manager - rise of 63%
• IT Procurement Manager - rise of 44%
• IT Administrator - rise of 37%
• IT Assessor - rise of 30%
• IT Specialist - rise of 29%
• IT Manager - rise of 16%

And the biggest drops have been for entry-level roles. IT apprentices saw a drop of nearly a third (32 per cent) when comparing July 2015 to July 2014, IT trainees saw a drop of 20 per cent, and IT consultants saw a 12 per cent decrease. While graduate roles haven't seen a drop, the salary has remained the same year-on-year, with an average monthly rise of just 0.17 per cent.

So where is the money?

Big data

The biggest jump in demand for IT roles has been in big data, according to Harvey Nash Professional Recruitment.

"In our recent Harvey Nash CIO Survey, which we conducted in association with KPMG, the demand for big data analytic skills leapt to the number one most-needed skill, sky-rocketing to almost six times higher than the next-most-scarce skill, change management. We have never seen demand for a skill expand so quickly as we have for big data analytics," said Andrew Heyes, MD Southern Regions, Harvey Nash Professional Recruitment.

- Average salaries for big data roles in Cambridge increased by £14,727 between Q4 2014 and Q2 2015, according to Experis's Tech Cities Job Watch

Another role where Harvey Nash has seen significant salary increases is that of business analyst, especially where the role is closely aligned to software development languages like Java.

"In this area it really is a seller's market; if we had a dozen good business analysts, we could walk them into a dozen great jobs," said Heyes.

Developers

Skilled candidates for development posts are in short supply as companies are investing in new projects and require both architects and developers to design and implement them.

"We have seen that C#, ASP.net and Java developers have experienced salary increases upwards of five per cent over the past year or so," said David Atkins, business director at Hays IT.

Meanwhile, according to Richard Knights, regional sales manager at ReThink Recruitment, even two years ago the field of front-end development was considerably less advanced than it is now with CSS, HTML and JQuery largely being used to develop the top layer of an application.

"Now with the advent of more in-depth full-stack capability which uses JavaScript libraries such as backbone.js, the skill-set has become more niche and much more complex," he said.

With the introduction of the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js and Node.js), along with Amazon Web Services, HTML5, UX, Nginx and SASS. The Washington Post is one example of an organisation that has full-stack developers with expertise in each layer of web development, but it is a rare breed.

"This has meant that these skills are harder to find and consequently salaries have risen. Two years ago a front-end developer would realistically be earning around £45k but now this has risen to north of £50-55k with senior professionals or team leaders able to claim as much a £70k," said Knights.

DevOps

Many may think that "DevOps" is merely as a buzzword, but Knights believes that companies are looking to bridge the gap that exists between developers and operations in order to provide a better service for customers and clients.

One way of doing this is to encourage and promote communication between the teams from the conception stage through to delivery, and this has led to an increase in demand for skilled DevOps engineers, he said.

"Consequently, salaries for experts in this area have shot up and this is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. It's difficult to make comparisons given the fact that this is a relatively new function, however in the past systems administrators or application support specialists would have carried out this role and would have earned around £45k," Knights claimed.

"Now, a DevOps Engineer will be on £55k plus and we've seen many professionals switch roles for as much as £90k," he said.

Security

Simon Kouttis, technical lead at executive search firm Stott and May, said that the company has seen a huge increase in salaries within IT, particularly when it comes to roles within security.

"Cyber-security has become a business-critical issue costing companies millions and one of the biggest concerns for businesses at the moment is the emerging cyber-skills gap. It's a candidate-led market driven by demand; companies are willing to pay for the talent they need so salaries are rising fast and will continue to do so," he added.

The high-profile attack at adulterers' website Ashley Madison follows a wave of huge assaults on large companies and government organisations, including US retailer Target, the US Office of Personnel Management and the UK organisations Carphone Warehouse and Mumsnet. The number of data breaches has driven up demand for security experts.

"Two years ago the role would command a salary around £35-40k but this has now leapt to as high as £55-60k. CISOs now earn approximately £80-90k outside of London while in the capital salaries generally clear six figures," said ReThink Recruitment's Knights.

Experis found that:

• Average salaries for IT Security roles in Bristol increased by £12,2559 between Q4 2014 and Q2 2015
• Average salaries for IT Security roles in Brighton increased by £21,209 between Q4 2014 and Q2 2015

Cloud

According to Harvey Nash, another area that has seen a huge increase in pay packets is the public cloud.

"Public cloud expertise (AWS/Rackspace/Azure) has seen rates shoot up over the past three years," said Heyes.

"There is so much demand now for companies to move data centres from on-premise to external clouds so you will see project managers, engineers and architects demand higher rates," he added.

Heyes warned companies that were moving to a public cloud that they may engage with a cloud consultancy such as Colt, Atos, IBM or Cloudsense to come on site and build a strategy and do the actual migration but they will be charged triple what it would cost to hire contractors and manage the project internally.

Breaking the £100k barrier

It comes as no surprise that £100k+ roles are commonplace amongst IT management. Harvey Nash's Heyes said that this was clear to see with the newly evolving chief digital officer (CDO) role.

"Despite its infancy, and many organisations still trying to bed its remit down, the CIO Survey reported that organisations with CDOs went from seven per cent last year to 17 per cent this year; in other words one in 10 companies hired one. That is a phenomenal growth, much greater than we have seen in other top tech roles like CTO or CIO," he said.

"CISOs, although a more specialised and - to some - more 'exotic' role have witnessed a similar growth. With so much in the news about hacking, to some company chairmen the CISO is the most important person to be talking to," he added.

But it is not just IT management roles that are commanding £100k+ salaries - technical roles can too.

Roles offering a six-figure salary according to CV-Library:

• Senior Network Architect (£100,000 per annum)
• CRM Solutions Manager (£100,000 per annum)
• Head of UX - (£100,000 per annum)
• System Interrogation Engineer - (£100,000 per annum)
• IT Architect (£100,000 per annum)
• Technical Architect - (£110,000 per annum)
• Head of Procurement (£100,000 per annum)
• IT Director (£100,000 per annum)
• Sales Director (up to £100,000 per annum)

Heyes says that senior project managers and very senior lead developers can very often command this level of remuneration, too.

"The thing that unites all these roles is that they are having some kind of strategic involvement in how the technology is shaped; in an increasingly complex and multifarious tech environment, this ‘shaping' role is becoming increasingly important," he said.

He added that IT roles in the financial services sector often command £100k salaries, and said that six figure pay packets were even more prominent in FinTech.

But it isn't only full-time, permanent staff that can earn six figures. According to CV-Library, six-figure salary jobs still tend to be more available to contractors, with some of the following roles emerging, and other similar ones out too:

• IT Continuity Management (£450 a day)
• IT Transition Manager (£475 a day)
• Head of IT Services - (£550 a day)