It’s a fascinating time to be alive, we can access any information we want at our fingertips. The internet has brought a lot of benefits to our society despite the myriad of challenges pointed out by experts.
Depending on who you are, it can be your worst enemy or it can be a library to satisfy your intellectual pursuit. It’s a tool and like all other tools, it should be used with moderation.
Due to the internet and the accessibility to information from experts around the world. We too can become a real expert or an armchair one who might dabble in certain topics for a brief period of time.
If you make it as a means to an end to learn a tech skill that is valuable, the world is open up to you. One of the main problems facing the software industry is not having enough skilled individuals to fill the talent gap.
Thus, recruiters have to be searching for remote engineers to fill a certain spot. This pain in the market has opened up a whole new level of opportunities for skilled workers from around the world.
Interestingly, we have reached a point where you don’t even need a degree anymore. You just need to do the job and do it well and depending on the skill you want to learn; it can be achievable.
If you are concerned about qualifications, you can get certificates online after completing couple of courses being offered by large tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and others.
Most of them are free, you also have education companies offering courses and certificates for free. In this post, I want to talk about 10 high-earning tech skills you can learn and earn money remotely.
Effort is Required
Despite the jobs pointed out below, it will not be an easy task to learn any of them. If you don’t have a tech background or you are not motivated to put in the work to get competent, it might be a waste of your time.
If you are motivated and have the burning spirit to give it a try, it will carry you through a lot of the ups and downs.
Additionally, it will take some time to get competent, depending on where you are and previous experience, it might take 12 months of continuous work or between 2-3 years to get good at what you do.
Despite the obstacles, it is doable as I have seen persons making life-changing money from a year of relentlessly learning a skill without any prior experience. Let’s get to it.
Cloud Engineer
Salary: $100,000 per year
As most businesses move to the cloud environment and startups scale, cloud engineers will be needed to do the heavy lifting of the backend environment. The cloud is basically an offsite server center usually managed by an outside company to host your company’s data.
Depending on where you work or where you are, a cloud engineer could be seen as a field by itself with other sub careers under it such as cloud developer, cloud architect, cloud security engineer, and many other careers which are not too far from each other in terms of responsibilities, so you can learn one or two of these skills in your spare time.
Roles:
- Collaborating with engineering and development teams to evaluate and identify optimal cloud solutions.
- Modifying and improving existing systems.
- Educating teams on the implementation of new cloud technologies and initiatives.
- Designing, developing and deploying modular cloud-based systems.
- Ensuring efficient functioning of data storage and processing functions in accordance with company security policies and best practices in cloud security.
Database Administrator
Salary: $90,000 per year
Database Administrators will be working on the backend side of the organization. Similar to a Cloud Engineer, they will be needed to work with information coming into the business. Databases are information storage systems that are normally recorded into a tabular format similar to an excel spreadsheet.
This information could be anything from a username to images. Typically, you will be working with a database management system to handle the complexity of all the different databases a company might have.
Due to the cloud, you will be working with cloud engineers, and over time you could be seen as one due to the fact that the tasks tend to overlap.
Roles:
- Managing, monitoring and maintaining company databases
- Making requested changes, updates and modifications to database structure and data
- Ensuring database security, integrity, stability and system availability
- Maintaining database backup and recovery infrastructure
Frontend Developer
Salary: $100,000 per year
Frontend development is one of the most popular developer jobs given its accessibility and demand within the job market. As a frontend developer, you will be tasked to develop the frontend part or user interaction part of an application.
For example, the part of a website that we usually see when we click on a web page is developed by a frontend developer.
Due to the demand and accessibility in terms of information provided on the internet, it can be competitive.
Roles:
- Determining the structure and design of web pages.
- Ensuring user experience determines design choices.
- Developing features to enhance the user experience.
- Striking a balance between functional and aesthetic design.
- Ensuring web design is optimized for smartphones.
Backend Developer
Salary: $110,000 per year
Backend development is the mere opposite of frontend development, you will be developing the backend part of the application. As a backend developer, you will be working closely with the database administrator and cloud engineers to ensure that the backend performance is optimal.
You will also be working with frontend developers to ensure that data is flowing from the frontend part of a website to the backend.
Roles:
- Building and maintaining web applications
- Assessing the efficiency and speed of current applications
- Writing high-quality code
- Managing hosting environments
- QA testing
- Troubleshooting and debugging
Mobile Application Developer
Salary: $110,000 per year
Smartphones aren’t as old as our computers but they have grown in leaps and bounds ever since their inception. As a mobile developer, you will be developing mobile applications for a company.
You could also use this skill to earn side income and develop applications for small to mid sizes businesses who might want a mobile application to be developed for their business.
Depending on where you work, you will be developing applications for the two dominant mobile operating systems, Android or Apple devices.
Roles:
- App coding, testing, debugging, documenting and monitoring
- Interacting with different departments within the organization regarding new deployments
- Contributing to the development of project schedules and workflows
- Recommending changes and enhancements to software applications
Data Scientist
Salary: $115,000 per year
Data analytics is a fast-growing field within the technology industry as businesses are waking up to the fact that the data that has been lying dormant within data warehouses are actually useful and not just taking up space.
A data scientist will be analyzing data on a daily basis, developing insights and making predictions on the future. Attention to detail and experimentation is a must, similarly to cloud engineering this is a pretty broad field with lots of subfields where the skills tend to overlap.
Roles:
- Identifying relevant data sources for business needs
- Collecting structured and unstructured data
- Sourcing missing data
- Organizing data in to usable formats
- Building predictive models
- Building machine learning algorithms
- Enhancing the data collection process
- Processing, cleansing & verifying of data
- Analyzing data for trends and patterns and to find answers to specific questions
- Setting up data infrastructure
- Develop, implement and maintain databases
- Assess quality of data and remove or clean data
- Generating information and insights from data sets and identifying trends and patterns
- Preparing reports for executive and project teams
- Create visualizations of data
Cyber Security Engineer
Salary: $100,000 per year
As most businesses venture out into the digital realm, criminals are right behind them to compromise their business. Network security is not just something that businesses used to bring up now and then as a nice to have, it’s a must, even to a small degree depending on the size of your business and incentive.
Hackers will more likely attack a hospital or bank where being accessible to sensitive data can lead to systemic risks.
To give you an idea on how prevalent cyber attacks have been check out threatmap to visualize attacks being played out in real time. Being a cyber security engineer, you will be tasked with maintaining the security of a company and ensure that malicious hackers cannot infiltrate your system.
It’s a large field with a lot of other specific fields and as often within the tech industry, the roles tend to overlap.
Roles:
- Planning, implementing, managing, monitoring, and upgrading security measures for the protection of the organization’s data, systems, and networks
- Troubleshooting security and network problems
- Responding to all system and/or network security breaches
- Ensuring that the organization’s data and infrastructure are protected by enabling the appropriate security controls
- Participating in the change management process
- Testing and identifying network and system vulnerabilities
- Daily administrative tasks, reporting, and communication with the relevant departments in the organization
DevOps Engineer
Salary: $120,000 per year
Devops Engineer is not a bad field to transition to after you have gained some experience within the tech industry. DevOps Engineer will be taking a system view of the organization’s development.
Productivity is also an essential goal as they will be tasked with automating certain parts of the organization, streamlining processes and reducing bottlenecks from development to deployment.
Roles:
- Understanding customer requirements and project KPIs
- Implementing various development, testing, automation tools, and IT infrastructure
- Planning the team structure, activities, and involvement in project management activities.
- Managing stakeholders and external interfaces
- Setting up tools and required infrastructure
- Defining and setting development, test, release, update, and support processes for DevOps operation
- Have the technical skill to review, verify, and validate the software code developed in the project.
- Troubleshooting techniques and fixing the code bugs
- Monitoring the processes during the entire lifecycle for its adherence and updating or creating new processes for improvement and minimizing the wastage
- Encouraging and building automated processes wherever possible
Machine Learning Engineer
Salary: $115,000 per year
Machine Learning could be seen as a sub-field under data scientists. Due to the technical breadth of the field, it is usually a standalone job even though data scientists do implement machine learning experiments.
Machine Learning Engineers usually develop models to predict and gain inference from data. A good example and common task within the banking industry is credit fraud prevention.
Engineers will have to plan and develop a system that can help with this matter. Over the years the field has grown and the applications are endless such as speech recognition, object detection, object tracking etc.
Roles:
- Designing ML systems.
- Selecting appropriate data sets.
- Picking appropriate data representation methods.
- Identifying differences in data distribution that affects model performance.
- Verifying data quality.
- Transforming and converting data science prototypes.
- Performing statistical analysis.
- Running machine learning tests.
- Using results to improve models.
- Training and retraining systems when needed.
- Developing machine learning apps according to client requirements.
Blockchain Developer
Salary: $150,000 per year
Cryptocurrency is the new buzzword being thrown around within the software industry. Now you have seasoned and new engineers diving into this new industry to develop products that can run on the blockchain.
If you are familiar with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple, these are all run on the blockchain. The blockchain could be seen as a distributed ledger where every transaction is viewed on a public interface.
This new system makes it decentralized and reduces the need for middle men in certain types of tasks. It’s an interesting and novel field that pretty much justifies the salary given that the skill is in demand and the industry is developing quite quickly.
Roles:
- Collaborating with managers to determine blockchain technology needs and envisaged functionalities.
- Creating application features and interfaces by using programming languages and writing multithreaded codes.
- Applying the latest cryptology techniques to protect digital transaction data against cyberattacks and information hacks.
- Maintaining client and server-side applications.
- Optimizing and securing blockchain applications by integrating new tools and technologies.
- Educating sales personnel on blockchain features that allow secure digital payments.
- Documenting blockchain development processes and complying with best practices in data protection.
- Keeping up with current blockchain technologies and cryptography methods.
Where should I go from here:
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of careers within the tech industry that are paying good money if you have the skill.
If you don’t know where exactly to start with these skills, you can learn them from online resources specifically from courses or boot camps.
Below is a list of some of the resources you can use:
The software industry is growing, countries are developing and they are going to need skilled workers who can learn quickly and adapt to ever-changing situations within a global market.
