These 3 'hot' tech skills can boost your pay by 22 percent

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If you're in the tech industry, there's plenty of money to be earned — but only if you've mastered the hottest, most in-demand skills.

And there's three in particular that are worth some bank, according to a new survey on job skills by Payscale.  

Payscale tapped into data on more than 2 million US workers to determine which skills increase a tech professional's salary the most.

They looked at how much more people with these skills earn than average.

When it comes to people in computer and mathematical occupations the top three pay-boosting skills increase salaries by 22%. Those skills are:

Scala, worth a 21.8% pay boost: Scala is a programming language that stands for "scalable language" that has been experiencing a surge in popularity recently.

It is considered to be an alternative to the very popular Java language, a language that fixes the things that programmers dislike about Java. And it's being used by all sorts of tech companies these days from Apple to startups. 

On the downside, it's got a reputation for being hard to learn.

Cisco's UCCE/IPCC, worth a 22.1% pay boost: This is call center technology that allows phone calls to be handled by a Cisco network. IT pros that know how to put together networks for your data, and for your phone calls, are commanding a better wage.

Go, worth a 22.4% pay boost: Google created a programming language called Golang or Go also as an alternative to Java. Its claim to fame is that it was designed to work with cloud computing, something that didn't really exist when Java was invented. In the past couple of years, Go's popularity has skyrocketed, between its use at Google, and by all sorts of startups.

Pro tip: because Google loves to create nicknames for people, the programmers who are in charge of the Go language at Google are known "gophers."

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