Noncertified skills: winners and losers
Foote Partners found that even as overall premiums fall, a subset of high-paying noncertified skills continues to command outsized pay, with bonuses ranging from 15% to 24% of base salary.
Risk analytics and assessment leads at a 24% premium, followed by smart contracts and AIOps at 23%. Apache Flink has climbed 15.8% in market value, while cryptography has surged 33.3%. Network Architecture, IT Governance, Threat Detection, and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) are each delivering 20% premiums and rising.
At the same time, more traditional areas are losing ground. Web and e-commerce development skills declined 9.7% year over year, database and data management fell 10.9%, and systems and networking dropped 7.6%, Foote Partners reported.
AI reshapes how IT work is valued
The bigger story behind the numbers, according to Foote, isn’t just which skills are up or down; it’s a fundamental shift in how organizations think about the work itself.
“With AI having shifted from experimental to operational, paying IT talent is becoming a new ballgame,” Foote said. “Employers are thinking about jobs more as tasks, not titles: tasks that can be done entirely by an AI agent/robot, tasks that will be done with a human working with an AI agent/robot, and finally, tasks that are uniquely human.”
Foote Partners now tracks about 136 certified and noncertified AI-related skills, up from 57 two years ago. AI certifications are outperforming noncertified AI skills on market value growth, increasing by nearly 4% over the past year versus a 4% decline. But noncertified AI skills still command higher bonuses, averaging 14% of base salary compared to 8.5% for certifications.
