Big Data is netting big salaries.
Whether its Moneyball, President Obama's election campaigns or just the social media-led explosion of information, "statistical analysis and data mining" topped LinkedIn's list of the 25 Hottest Skills That Got People Hired in 2014.
Last year, the top skill was "social media marketing." Data mining was No. 5.
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For those who have those skills, these are good times. Glassdoor reports that the average salary for a data scientist is $118,709 versus $64,537 for a programmer. A McKinsey study predicts that by 2018, the U.S. could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 "people with deep analytic skills" as well as 1.5 million "managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions."
Otherwise, the rest of the list was heavily populated by tech-related skills: