Multi-skilling helps professionals grab the high-paying jobs in big data

Soma Tah

As more and more working professionals are looking for career advancement, a dominant trend of upskilling and multi-skilling is quite prevalent in the IT industry today.

Multi-skilling refers to acquiring different skill sets in a particular domain. From a company point of view, multi-skilled employees provide the organization the flexibility to take on different projects based on the industry needs. From a professional’s point of view, multi-skilling leads to better career prospects and high monetary benefits too.

Kashyap Dalal, Chief Business Officer of online education provider of professional training, Simplilearn  says, “While multi-skilling is a great asset for all professionals, this is especially pronounced for some technologies. Big data is one such field. Most professionals start their journey with expertise in Hadoop. However professionals who master complementary skills like MongoDB, Scala, Kafka and Impala see as much as 30 per cent higher salaries in comparison. The reason for this is that organizations are seeing huge efficiencies in having resources who are flexible and can deliver as per the needs of the project, rather than being confined to just one specific technology."

Simplilearn has also prepared a report on ‘How multi-skilling in big data can help in a uptick in salary and job opportunities’ which shows the skills that are most popular in addition to Hadoop.

There is a requirement of 60,000 Hadoop professionals in the industry now, as per Simplilearn estimates, among which Hadoop-only requirement is just 25,000. The report shows that multi-skilling in big data can bring the professionals 2.5times more job opportunities than they get with any single skill.

The below diagram shows the other popular skills along with Hadoop:

The report also highlights that while the average salary of big data professional, with only Hadoop skill is about 8.5 lakhs per year, whereas a big data professional with multiple skills (Hadoop + Hive + Kafka + Cassandra) can get more than 10.5 lakhs per year- that’s a 25 per cent uptick with just three additional skills.

Here's the salary raise trends for multi-skilling:

3-skills combo:

Hadoop + Hive + Kafka: 19% salary uptick

Hadoop + MongoDB + Spark: 18% salary uptick

Hadoop + Spark + Cassandra: 18% salary uptick

Hadoop + MongoDB + Cassandra: 17% salary uptick

4-skills combo:

Hadoop + Hive + Kafka + Cassandra: 25% salary uptick

Hadoop + MongoDB + Spark + Kafka: 24% salary uptick

Hadoop + Spark + Cassandra + HBase: 23% salary uptick

Hadoop + MongoDB + Cassandra + kafka: 24% salary uptick

5-skills combo:

Hadoop + Hive + Kafka + Cassandra + Scala: 30% salary uptick

Hadoop + MongoDB + Spark + Kafka + Scala: 27% salary uptick

Hadoop + Spark + Cassandra + HBase + Kafka: 26% salary uptick

Hadoop + MongoDB + Cassandra + Kafka + Pig: 27% salary uptick