--- title: 25 Career Skills That Deliver the Biggest Salary Boost description: MONEY and Payscale uncovered the 25 best career & job skills that deliver the biggest salary boost across all industries. authors: - name: Kerri Anne Renzulli url: https://money.com/author/kerri-anne-renzulli/ at_money_since: 2014 articles: 185 covers: - Career Advice - Banking - Business - Credit - Credit Cards - Economy and Politics - Education - Housing - Identity Theft - Insurance - Investing - Lifestyle - Loans - Mortgages - Personal Finance - Pets - Retirement - Shopping - Taxes social: - https://x.com/kerenzulli former_staff: true published: '2016-05-16T22:00:35.000Z' modified: '2024-04-16T10:53:02.000Z' section: Career Advice tags: - best career skills 2016 - best skills - job skills - pay raise - salary - salary boost word_count: 338 canonical: https://money.com/career-skills-that-boost-your-salary/ type: Article source: structured-blocks --- > **Disclosure:** We research all brands listed and may earn a fee from our partners. Research and financial considerations may influence how brands are displayed. Not all brands are included. [Learn more](https://money.com/page/disclaimer/). ![160401_CAR_HealthforPay_Money_GEN](https://img.money.com/2016/04/160401_car_healthforpay.jpg) One good way to increase your pay: Make sure you've got the [skills](https://money.com/most-valuable-career-skills/) that employers pay more for. For Money and compensation data and software company [PayScale.com](http://payscale.com)'s exclusive analysis of the [21 Most Valuable Career Skills](https://money.com/most-valuable-career-skills/), we wanted to help the most Money readers, so we looked specifically for skills correlated with higher pay across a broad range of occupations. But sometimes, for any single job, there's one team member who's making an extra chunk of change simply by having this year's hottest skill. Currently, that skill is Scala — a popular programming language with a wide range of applications, from analyzing biological data to building Twitter**.** Employees who identified Scala as a core job skill earned 22.2% more than their peers, holding constant such factors as job title, experience, age, and location. Indeed, of the 25 skills that showed the greatest such payoff, 23 of them are somehow technology related — whether a coding language, a software program, or a technological approach. Want to earn more money than your peers without being a tech expert? The other two slots on the list were examples of financial expertise: mergers and acquisitions, at No. 7 with a 17.2% pay premium, and equity management, one run lower with a 16.7% higher salary. What follows is the full list of skills, along with each one's correlated pay bump. *To see full coverage of Money's Best Career Skills 2016, click here.* | Rank | Skill | Pay Boost | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | Scala | 22.2% | | 2 | Cisco UCCE/IPCC | 21.1% | | 3 | Go | 20.0% | | 4 | Natural Language Processing | 17.9% | | 5 | Apache Spark | 17.7% | | 6 | Algorithm Development | 17.3% | | 7 | Mergers and Acquisitions | 17.2% | | 8 | Equity Management | 16.7% | | 9 | Kernel Development | 15.6% | | 10 | Hybrid Systems | 14.6% | | 11 | Splunk | 14.3% | | 12 | MapReduce | 14.2% | | 13 | Apache Hive | 13.1% | | 14 | Apple Xcode | 13.0% | | 15 | Ruby on Rails | 12.9% | | 16 | Apache Cassandra | 12.8% | | 17 | NoSQL | 12.6% | | 18 | Amazon Web Services | 12.6% | | 19 | Hadoop | 12.5% | | 20 | Ruby | 12.3% | | 21 | Puppet | 12.0% | | 22 | Machine Learning | 11.9% | | 23 | Objective-C | 11.7% | | 24 | iOS SDK | 11.4% | | 25 | Oracle Learning Management System | 11.4% | ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://money.com/career-skills-that-boost-your-salary/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://money.com" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Career Advice", "item": "https://money.com/career-advice/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Skills", "item": "https://money.com/skills/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 4, "name": "25 Career Skills That Deliver the Biggest Salary Boost" } ] }, { "@type": "WebSite", "@id": "https://money.com/#website", "url": "https://money.com", "name": "Money", "publisher": { "@id": "https://money.com/#organization" } }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://money.com/career-skills-that-boost-your-salary/#webpage", "url": "https://money.com/career-skills-that-boost-your-salary/", "name": "25 Career Skills That Deliver the Biggest Salary Boost", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://money.com/#website" }, "datePublished": "2016-05-16T22:00:35.000Z", "mainEntity": { "@id": "https://money.com/career-skills-that-boost-your-salary/" }, "inLanguage": "en-US", "breadcrumb": { "@id": "https://money.com/career-skills-that-boost-your-salary/#breadcrumb" }, "dateModified": "2024-04-16T10:53:02.000Z" }, { "@type": "Article", "headline": "25 Career Skills That Deliver the Biggest Salary Boost", "articleSection": "Career Advice", "image": [ { "@type": "ImageObject", "url": "https://img.money.com/2016/04/160401_car_healthforpay.jpg", "width": 2100, "height": 1269, "caption": "160401_CAR_HealthforPay_Money_GEN" } ], "author": [ { "@type": "Person", "name": "Kerri Anne Renzulli", "url": "https://money.com/author/kerri-anne-renzulli/", "@id": "https://money.com/author/kerri-anne-renzulli/#author", "image": "https://img.money.com/2014/05/14-05-21_bio_author_renzulli.jpg?quality=85&w=190&h=190&crop=1", "email": "kerri.renzulli@moneymail.com", "sameAs": [ "https://x.com/kerenzulli" ] } ], "publisher": "https://money.com/#organization", "datePublished": "2016-05-16T22:00:35.000Z", "description": "MONEY and Payscale uncovered the 25 best career & job skills that deliver the biggest salary boost across all industries.", "abstract": "MONEY and Payscale uncovered the 25 best career & job skills that deliver the biggest salary boost across all industries.", "@id": "https://money.com/career-skills-that-boost-your-salary/", "inLanguage": "en-US", "dateModified": "2024-04-16T10:53:02.000Z", "wordCount": 338, "keywords": [ "best career skills 2016", "best skills", "job skills", "pay raise", "salary", "salary boost" ], "about": [ { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Career counseling", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Career_counseling" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Skill", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill" ] } ] } ] } ```