These jobs pay $100k – no degree required
Demand for skilled tech workers outpaces supply
SAN FRANCISCO – More of the country’s highest-paying jobs are in technology, and they all require specialized training – but not necessarily an advanced degree. In return, workers can expect a salary of $100,000 or beyond.
Glassdoor, a jobs and recruiting website, found that 13 of the 25 highest-paying jobs in America are in tech, up from 11 in last year’s report. Tech has the most jobs of any field in the top
25, while health care holds the spots for most richly paid.
What are they? In tech, the highestpaying jobs include enterprise architect ($115,944 median base salary), software development manager
($108,879) and software engineering manager ($107,479).
Overall, physician jobs pay the most
($195,842 median base salary), pharmacy manager is second ($146,412) and pharmacist is third ($127,120).
The report is based on salary reports from people who hold these positions shared on Glassdoor’s website.
There are no CEOs, professional athletes or movie stars on the list because Glassdoor doesn’t include “C suite” or executive jobs with a “Chief ” at the front of the title. And the company only includes positions with at least
100 reviews on its site.
“For many years tech roles have dominated this list,” says Amanda Stansell, an economic research analyst at Glassdoor. “This reinforces that employers are willing to pay top dollar for these positions.”
High demand for skilled tech workers continues to outpace supply, Stansell said. Those jobs don’t only exist at major tech companies, as many tech roles have moved to other industries. In retail, for example, companies “need skilled tech workers to research and analyze data to further their business practices,” Stansell said.
A different study from commercial real estate firm CBRE, released last month, found similar results. That report said cities such as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have an influx of tech graduates but not enough jobs to keep them all there. Many of those tech graduates are relocating to cities with a lower cost of living in the American Midwest and Canada.
Skilled workers entering the workforce now should look at their online network for people doing the jobs that they want, Stansell says. That way, they’ll see the diverse paths to get there.
For a data scientist in particular (No. 25 on the list), there are many different ways to land a high-paying job, and it doesn’t always require an advanced degree. “You can get many of these jobs by attending a coding boot camp or by learning different coding languages,” Stansell said.
Other jobs, such as a scrum master, or someone who manages the process of how information is exchanged (No. 20 on the list with $98,239), require several years of on-the-job experience.
Eight job titles are new to the list this year, including strategy manager (No. 18, $101,754), cloud engineer (No. 23, $96,449) and data scientist (No. 25, $96,116).
Glassdoor also studied what job seekers are looking for when researching job ads. A survey found that salary and benefits are the most important factors for Americans when job searching, followed by location, commute time and positive employee reviews.