Here are the top 10 hottest jobs in it right now. Number 10 might surprise you.
Hot means more demand, higher salaries. And each job on my list,
according to the 2023 Dice Tech salary survey, had the highest salary increase,
which usually means more demand. Now, number one,
which is also pretty surprising, is the help desk technician. What? Yes.
Like a lot of people,
this was my first job in it and a stepping stone to an extremely fulfilling
career. Now check this out.
Help desk roll saw an increase of 6.9% with an average salary of 55,000
a year. That's a lot of money,
especially since becoming a help desk technician doesn't require a ton of
experience or skills like seriously.
To be a good help desk technician to land this job and be amazing,
the best skill you can have is customer service. Soft skills.
Can you talk to people? When a user calls in,
you're the first person they talk to, you're the first impression.
You set the tone and the pace for the entire IT department. It's a big job.
Not many people say you can skip the help desk. I say don't.
Because it's here where you prove your technical prowess and your ability to
talk to humans as well as computers.
It's where you develop the soft skills that will set you apart and make you
amazing later on in your career. Don't skip this now,
to get a job on the help desk customer service skills, again,
are the biggest thing. Second, I would say troubleshooting.
Can you troubleshoot a problem? Stick with it, Google it and figure it out.
And then third, a solid foundation of IT skills is definitely helpful. Now,
a lot of this you can learn on the job,
but as you're applying for jobs and trying to land that first role,
it'll definitely help to get a few certifications under your belt.
My favorite for this is the compt A plus. This was my first certification.
It's what helped me land a help desk job and get to where I am Now I can vouch
for it and really that's the only one I would focus on until you land that first
job. Now how do you get the compt A plus? Well, IT Pro by a c i learning,
they're my favorite IT training provider and the sponsor of this video,
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So was that surprising for you to know the help desk is growing in demand?
Honestly, I'm glad to see it.
To know that this pivotal role in IT is thriving and will continue to do so with
an average salary that outpaces most industries. I love it.
Now here's an example job right here,
a technical desktop support technician with the Dallas Independent School
District. There's the salary range,
and let me show you what they're looking for.
I'm not sure why they have this at the bottom,
but excellent customer service skills is a must. A plus certification,
preferred troubleshooting and a bunch of other things that you could Google.
Try out yourself and deploy in your own lab to get prepared for this.
Don't wait to get in it. Don't wait to finish that degree. Just do it now.
Now number two, you probably saw coming.
If you're super organized and love to plan and also make tons of money,
project management is the job for you.
Any good IT team needs an IT project manager,
someone responsible for the planning,
the execution and the completion of IT projects,
making sure they come in on time and on budget.
Now this sucker's seeing crazy growth 15.6% with an average salary of
$120,000 a year. Now keep in mind this is an average salary,
meaning some roles require five to seven years of experience to get that kind of
money and other roles will require less experience and pay less money.
So keep that in mind.
You're not gonna bust into project management and immediately start making
$120,000 a year, but you'll get there.
And this will ring true for most of the jobs I mentioned in this list.
Now project management is a tough job and when thinking about it,
project management,
it means you have to have a bit of knowledge of it as well as the organizational
skills to do the job. Like I could not do this job. I hate this stuff.
I don't like creating timelines and tracking deliverables and identifying
requirements and keeping everyone happy. It's stressful.
And you'll often be meeting with stakeholders,
the people who care about the projects and higher ups and managers and telling
them, Hey, this is why the project isn't on time.
Or maybe telling them it is on time and you're doing a great job.
It's not for everyone, but if it is for you, do it. But how do you do it?
Now to jump into the wonderful world of project management,
I would recommend the Project Plus from CompTIA. Go find it real quick.
Here it is. Project Management Project Plus, looking at this thing,
it'll give you a pretty solid foundation of project management and will help you
land that first job. I mean, look at all this.
And while you already may be a super organized person,
you have to understand the lingo of project management.
This'll help you get there.
I always say get your first job after that and then jump into something like the
P M P. This sucker's the gold standard of certifications for project management.
If you have this, you can pretty much go anywhere,
but they do require proof that you have experience. How much do they require?
Lemme see P and p requirements. If you don't have a degree,
you gotta have 60 months of experience and 35 hours of training.
Speaking of jobs, what does it look like? Lemme show you a few.
Here we have project manager one. Here's some of the stuff that you'll be doing,
everything I've mentioned already. And this particular job is pretty rigorous.
They do want a bachelor's degree, very technical focused,
and they want you to have a P M P.
Here's one with a salary range of 70 to a hundred K,
and they're actually wanting someone with IT experience.
So this might be a role you'll jump into after already doing the help desk or
some kind of technical support role.
It does help to understand the mentality of an IT person. Number three,
it probably won't surprise you either. We have systems engineers, yes,
system admins and engineers are still very hot in a bunch of ways with a salary
increase of 7.5% and an average salary of $120,000 per year.
This job's amazing and it's perfect for those of you looking for the next step
after help desk,
especially if you fell in love with the server management aspect of it or maybe
cloud or Linux or whatever.
Now I say all that because the term SIS admin or SIS engineer,
it encompasses a pretty wide variety of roles you might find.
Rarely are two jobs the same. It might be a VMware engineer,
a cloud and engineer, a server engineer, a Linux engineer,
like there's a bunch of different engineers you can be or admins.
But whatever the case, just know your job will be focusing on designing,
building and maintaining the solutions for your company. Now, being so varied,
it's hard to recommend one cert to get this job because it depends. For example,
if you wanna go cloud, you might go for the Microsoft Azure administrator,
a Z 1 0 4 or the Google Cloud platform,
associate cloud engineer or the A W S certified Solutions architect associate.
Always a mouthful. Or you might get some Linux Comp tl, Linux plus L,
pick one L,
pick two if you wanna become a Linux administrator or just have those skills
'cause they will come in handy, believe me,
or go deeper down the Microsoft track.
And then adding some Python skills and PowerShell skills, definitely a plus.
Now, as far as jobs, here's a few examples.
Here's one that focuses specifically on VMware and S C C M.
And as a systems engineer or admin,
not only will you be helping design and build solutions,
but you also be supporting them.
You'll probably be the last line of support from the help desk.
They might have tier one, tier two, tier three,
and they hand it off to you when it's an issue they can't solve.
And for this particular role, here's what they're looking for.
The M r vSphere experience, they want some networking knowledge,
Microsoft and Linux OSS knowledge.
And a common thread you'll see across every area in it is they're dying for you
to have customer service skills, good problem solving skills,
excellent interpersonal skills.
Lemme tell you something about really any job everywhere in the world.
If you're fun to work with and you're humble and you work hard,
you can surpass most of your peers.
It's really easy to hire someone you like that's personable and extremely hard
to fire that same person. And again,
this particular job is looking for the V C P certification from VMware,
C C N A from Cisco, Nutanix, NetApp, E M C.
It's a varied role and you don't have to know everything here to be able to
apply for a role like this. This is a wishlist. If you have two or three things,
apply for it. They know you can learn it on the job. Number four,
I bet you didn't see this one coming. Cybersecurity engineer,
of course you saw that coming, right?
Cybersecurity has been and will continue to be one of the hottest careers in the
world. Not just it, but everywhere.
With a salary increase of 7.7% and an average salary of, well, is that right?
145,000 a year. There are plenty of jobs and money to go around now.
Cybersecurity is all about it. Security, protecting a company and its stuff.
And you'll either be helping bolstering its defenses or testing them and seeing
if you can bypass them and then tell them where they need to fill the holes and
fix it.
Now the range of roles here is pretty wide and you may find yourself picking
between a dozen or so different specialties within cybersecurity.
But just know this cybersecurity,
whatever path you choose is an advanced career. You can't just go, huh,
I wanna become a cybersecurity engineer without any experience or knowledge.
You'll often combine the skills from all the roles we mentioned so far,
help desk system administration, no Linux and Windows and cloud.
You'll take those skills with you into learning to become a cybersecurity
engineer.
'cause you have to know how things work before you can protect them from getting
hacked. So you'll often see people stepping into cybersecurity from those roles.
It's an advanced step up. It's a specialty. Not to get started in cybersecurity.
I do have a roadmap video that I made earlier this year. Check it out.
Link below or somewhere up here.
But it's gonna involve a lot of prerequisite knowledge,
cutting your teeth on the beginning, IT foundations,
and then moving on to more advanced things.
You might want to learn how to be a red teamer or someone who is really good at
attacking it. Systems for good.
So you look at the E J P T certification or the C P T S certification from Hack
the Box. And from there you might wanna go more advanced, get your O S C P.
And then on the ball blue team side of things where you're more focused on
securing the stuff, there are a ton of options. For example,
every vendor think Cisco, Microsoft, Azure, A W ss.
They have specific certifications that focus on securing their platforms and
their devices going down those certification paths, C C M P security,
the Azure security engineer associate,
those will definitely help you land a job in the blue team area or the IT
security area of it as far as jobs go. Here's an example.
This one's actually pretty fun. This is working for Toyota, north America.
Red team, purple team, cybersecurity engineer. Sounds fun, right?
This type of job is wanting five years of experience in cybersecurity.
They want you to know penetration testing and looking at certifications.
They want you to have the O SS C P. Well, it's an added bonus.
You don't have to have it. Now, don't get me wrong,
there are more junior roles in cybersecurity.
You might work for a knock or a soc and those jobs are easier to land,
but they often will require a bit of knowledge and experience before you get
there. Number five, have you ever wanted to become a unicorn?
Of course you have a unicorn, also referred to as a DevOps engineer.
It's a rare breed.
A combination of software programming skills and system administration skills
meld together to become awesome Captain Planet style. Captain.
Planet.
That's how old I am.
With an insane increase of 14.1% and an average salary of
$136,000 a year. You'll be making bank with plenty of jobs to choose from.
But this is a hard job. It requires lots of knowledge.
It's definitely advanced and requires to have your feet in two worlds.
You gotta know development programming.
And this usually might involve a few languages, Python, Java,
whatever that company needs.
But then you also have to know the system administration side, A W s, Azure,
how to do Microsoft stuff, Linux things.
And it's combining those two skills that makes a DevOps engineer.
You're kind of the middleman between those two worlds making things work.
And your job will involve automating the system, developing DevOps pipelines.
So when you think I wanna become a DevOps engineer,
just know this is a role that's later on down the line.
Once you've accumulated some skills and worked a few roles,
the good news is that certification and training for DevOps is becoming kind of
mainstream. Now. You'll need to know tools like Puppet, chef Jenkins, Ansible,
and know how to use DevOps pipelines within all the big cloud providers. Google,
Azure and Amazon. I couldn't think of Amazon. Why couldn't I think of that?
And as far as certifications, lemme show you real quick.
A w s has their A W S certified DevOps engineer,
which is very solid and very well respected. And Azure has a similar thing.
Now as far as jobs,
here's what you can look for and looking at the responsibilities,
a lot of this is developing and maintaining templates and automation solutions.
Collaborating with the enterprise architects security team.
You're the liaison between the code world and the systems administration world
and they're looking for a lot of code experience. Python, PowerShell Bash,
Azure, A W S, Google Cloud, C I C D tooling. And look at these salary ranges.
, isn't it crazy?
Now number seven and eight are probably the most lucrative jobs on this list,
at least potentially they have to do with management.
Number seven is the M I S or management information systems manager, A K A,
the IT manager with an increase of 10.8% in an average salary of
$132,000 a year. Stepping into management is a good idea. High demand,
high salaries, but it's hard. It's not for everyone here.
You're gonna be gifted at managing people and specifically for it.
It requires knowing a bit of it. Usually coming from that world,
coming from a support role and moving up,
you may find that you're gifted in that area of managing people,
managing projects, helping to build up your IT team.
And it also usually involves leading the IT infrastructure decisions.
What app are you going to use? What tech stack are you going to deploy?
It falls to you. That kind of pressure, that kind of responsibility. It's hard,
but it does come in with a pretty big paycheck.
Now they're in high demand always because they're hard to find.
But if you find yourself good at this, go for it. Here are a few jobs,
information technology manager, and this one seems very technical.
You're gonna be overseeing a lot of these, these technologies.
You have to know what your engineers are doing and provide solutions to maybe
existing problems that just couldn't be solved.
Now the path to becoming an IT manager varies. Usually in my experience,
it involves someone who's been doing it and they happen to have a skillset
geared towards managing people.
Maybe you became a supervisor and you shined in that role and you moved up and
suddenly you're the manager. Maybe you're a team manager,
network team manager or a cloud team. Eng uh manager.
That's the usual progression. And normally you don't skip that.
One of the main downsides with this is that you end up doing more management and
less technical things. So if you really love it, you love the technical aspect,
you're gonna be torn away from that world just a bit. But if you don't mind it,
number eight might be your next step. This is IT management, the C-suite,
big C T O C I O, chief technology officer, chief information officer,
or a VP or a director.
The growth is 8.4% average salary of $164,000 a year.
And that range is kind of nuts. Now these roles require a strong,
strong ability to lead because normally you're leading the leaders,
you're leading the managers in your IT department. And not only that,
you have to have a strong vision to where you're gonna lead the IT department.
Are you gonna go to the cloud or stay OnPrem?
You're gonna be focusing on budgets,
you're gonna be talking to the other C-suite people, the CEOs, the stakeholders,
and the bucks stops with you. Servers go down, it's your fault company,
get tacked, you got hacked. It's your fault. You have to answer for it.
But with that responsibility and that stress comes a pretty big paycheck.
Here's one of the jobs right here. , they just straight up tell you, um,
$800,000 a year remote. But it's an intense role.
They want 10 years of experience in management. And normally,
and this is the one area in it where if you want to become this,
I would say you need a degree and not just a bachelor's,
you wanna go for a master's, maybe an M B A. If your goal,
your aspiration is to become an IT manager, C T O C I O, vp, whatever,
get a degree, I think you're gonna need it in most situations.
Number eight might sound redundant, but it is different.
We have the application support engineer now,
whereas the help desk role is more focused on helping the users troubleshoot
their problems and handling those first level issues.
An application support engineer is dealing with supporting a specific
application.
They normally have a bit of programming knowledge and they help the developers
test it, troubleshoot it,
and even maintain it with the growth of 6.3% and average salary of $96,000 per
year. It is more advanced,
but it's a great job now because you'll be supporting the development
environment, whatever app your company might be producing or supporting,
you'll need to know some programming language, whatever that app is built in.
So Python, java, c plus plus.net, and be doing things like software testing,
problem solving.
You might need to know a bit of networking and things about databases and
certainly customer support, interpersonal skills, soft skills.
And a lot of this might surround the A L M or application life cycle management.
I almost couldn't say that. And you'll learn frameworks like Waterfall or Agile,
itil, scrum. So as I said before, this is more of an advanced job.
You'll need foundational skills and then you'll add stuff on top of it.
So learning Agile, so taking some ITIL L courses, scrum courses,
and even jumping into a W s and learning some A W S certified SYSOPS
Administrator certifications. Here's the job you might see,
and this is actually working for JP Morgan Chase and go.
And you can see where a help desk might troubleshoot some basic stuff.
This is more troubleshooting code issues as far as you can go.
And if you can't do anymore, you just escalate it.
But you'll also be in charge of monitoring infrastructure and what they're
looking for. Definitely some programming, cloud platforms, networking,
they want a lot. Number nine, you can make a surprising amount of money,
but you won't see this role everywhere.
This is for companies that have very large complex projects.
This is the program analyst or program manager working alongside the project
manager, the program analyst.
Zero in on making sure the project stays on budget and is on time.
They'll analyze a project, identifying any risks, helping solve issues,
and monitoring compliance and regulation issues.
It's a more niche role than a project manager.
They're more focused on those tasks. And the demand is pretty high.
The head of 12.9% salary increase and an average salary of $139,000 per year,
it's pretty good. But you'll be working for a big company.
And when looking for jobs, I've noticed it's normally like military.
So this job right here, program analyst for fema, which is government obviously,
but looking at some of these job tasks,
translating business needs into technical and functional requirements,
facilitating and participating in agile ceremonies. I don't know what that is,
but I know it has something to do with Agile. It sounds very Harry Potter, like.
I don't know why. Maybe it's not that much fun. Documentation, presentations,
briefings a great role if you're really good at this stuff. And finally,
number 10, the one that really might surprise you, network engineer.
You may have heard it said network engineering is dying. No, it's not.
It's very much alive with a salary increase of 6.1% and an average salary of
$99,000 per year. This career, this job is so fun.
I can vouch for it personally. It's what I used to do.
Similar to the system engineer or system admin.
This might be your next step up after a help desk job or role.
If you find that you love the networking side of things,
how packets traverse and network, how the routers and switches work.
This might be the job for you. Now, yes,
more and more things are becoming automated,
but it doesn't mean this job is going away.
It just means your skillset might change and the numbers don't lie.
This job is hot. People wanna hire network engineers. So how do you become one?
Well, the best certification you can pursue,
and this happens to be one of the best certifications ever across multiple
disciplines. From cybersecurity to system administration to DevOps to cloud.
And it's among the most popular certifications on IT Pro tv,
it's the Cisco C C N A. I currently hold a Cisco C C N A.
I've taught courses on it. I'm teaching courses on it.
This is the gold standard.
Getting the certification will usually help you land your first junior network
administration role. From there,
you can build up your career and make some serious money and your job will be
supporting networks. If the internet goes down, they're gonna call you,
which can be scary, but also very fun. Here are some a junior network engineer.
What are they looking for? Well, what do you know?
They want you to have a C N A. They point out specific technologies like IPSec,
V P N N P L S I S I S.
And as things are changing that we need to talk about automation. Some Ansible.
Here's a more senior rule, a network engineer lead at Bank of America.
And you can see the required skills are a bit longer that we need know SD-wan,
SD access, which is more automated networking.
Not only do they want you to have C C N A C C D P C C M P,
which are also Cisco certifications,
but also some Juniper certifications and coding and application design
experience. So did anything on this list surprise you?
I think number 10 was most surprising for me. Also, number one, help desk,
whatever the case.
This list was super encouraging for me to see the numbers don't lie.
It is extremely hot and I love that all these roles are at the top of the list.
Let me know what you think. So which job do you want?
Which one are you aiming for? Or maybe you already have it.
Let me know what you think. Is it fun? Is it actually hot? Comment below.
I wanna hear from you and thank you again to our sponsor IT Pro from a c i
learning for making this video possible and having pretty much every bit of
training you need for any one of these roles. Anyways, that's all I got.
I'll catch you guys next time.