High Tech, High Demand: The Hottest Tech Skills for 2017

As the U.S. moves to a more technology-centric economy, the demand for highly skilled IT professionals is growing. Often, companies are on the hunt for workers with very specific skillsets. Applicants that can demonstrate a good level of understanding of the following technologies will stand out from the crowd:

Each of these fields of expertise is in need of educated, experienced applicants who not only know their way around these systems, but also possess the soft skills to communicate data to those in non-technical positions.

Critically, the growth of cloud computing services isn’t expected to slow down anytime soon. Louis Columbus, writing for Forbes Magazine, reported that, in 2015, Amazon Web Services generated revenue over 69 percent higher than 2014 figures - over $7.88 billion! And according to rhipe, a cloud software licensing expert, worldwide public IT cloud services revenue is expected to exceed $127 billion by 2018.

With billions upon billions of bytes of data being stored in the cloud, businesses will require skilled data miners to sift through it all. Plus, digital security experts are needed to keep sensitive consumer data safe from hackers. Considering that 2015 had 38 percent more instances of security breaches than 2014, the current security workforce will need to be augmented to withstand future cyber attacks.

As job seekers look for opportunities to build their careers, focusing on any of these five tech skills is likely to yield great results going forward. The cloud is here to stay, and it’s going to require a workforce that can keep up with its growing demands.