Bluewolf Study: Cloud/Mobile Salaries Rising, Talent Gap Widening

The salaries for IT workers in the cloud and mobile spaces are skyrocketing, but a shallow talent pool is posing challenges for companies looking to fill those jobs with skilled workers.

Cloud solution provider Bluewolf recently released its annual IT Salary Guide for 2012. In its report, Bluewolf found that the biggest increase in demand is for mobile, data, cloud and user engagement technologists. The problem, Bluewolf said, is the lack of available talent to fill these roles and the decline in job candidates with the required skill sets.

[Related: Bluewolf Deepens Cloud Talent Pool With Free Training For Unemployed ]

"Organizations aren't just competing against each other for qualified tech professionals -- they're contending with an ever-widening talent gap and the mass exodus of baby boomer retirees," warned Bluewolf co-founder and principal Michael Kirven in a statement. "This poses a huge challenge for businesses as they scramble to adopt new flexible technologies that support the agile enterprise, but for those with the right skill sets, this should come as good news."

Bluewolf's IT salary outlook comes as the demand for cloud computing skills explodes, with hiring for cloud computing expertise growing 61 percent year over year, a recent report from talent research firm Wanted Analytics found.

Bluewolf's salary report examined major industries including media, telecom, health care, retail, manufacturing and financial services. Overall, Bluewolf predicted that senior software developer salaries would rise 6 percent with an average high of $99,000 per year in 2012.

Meanwhile, starting salaries for Android, iPhone and iPad developers are expected to jump to $98,000 per year. Top-tier ERP, business intelligence and CRM developer salaries are expected to jump from a range of $84,000 to $105,000 to $88,000 to $110,000.

Other areas that are predicted to see salary growth include front-end and user experience technologists using HTML5, increasing to between $89,000 and $127,000; and security analysts, increasing to between $94,000 and $125,000 annually. Data analysts and business intelligence professionals are expected to see salaries rise between 5 percent and 6 percent, a slight increase over pre-recession levels, Bluewolf found.

According to Bluewolf, C-level executives, namely CIOs and CSOs, are expected to see the largest gains, while database administrators, business intelligence analysts and data architects should experience the largest salary hikes.

Bluewolf also measured which skills are hot and which are not in certain technology areas. In the mobile space, the demand for HTML5, iPhone, iPad and Android skills is up more than 200 percent, while BlackBerry and Windows Mobile are down more than 50 percent. For big data, MySQL, HBase, Cognos and Informatica are up more than 100 percent, while DB2 is down more than 50 percent. In the cloud, Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce and Google Apps skills are hot with a 100 percent increase in demand, while Amazon Web Services EC2 talent demand is emerging with a 50-plus percent increase. And on the user engagement side, user interface design is up more than 100 percent, while Flash, Flex and ActionScript are down more than 50 percent.

"The growing demand we're seeing for tech professionals is driven by a need to bring greater agility into the enterprise," Kirven said. "This in turn is fueled by a volatile global economy combining with changes in customer expectations, workforce dynamics and technology itself. But businesses and workers alike must invest in training to ensure the skills are there to meet emerging challenges and opportunities."