10 Web Skills That Pay

Want to boost your income? If you can expand your skill set then you can make a solid start on building up your salary. Here are 10 ways to become a more attractive prospect for employers and clients

- Jim Mccauley

1 Javascript

There are lots of JavaScript jobs out there but the bar is remarkably low. Take the time to become better than the herd and you can quickly start commanding serious money

This might seem like a glaringly obvious place to start but we’re kicking off with JavaScript for a good reason: decent JavaScript developers are in surprisingly short supply. If you can demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of vanilla JavaScript then you’re immediately on a firm footing to find well-paying work. If you add some of the more popular frameworks to your armoury then you can start earning some serious money.

James Huckle, head of technology at Mirum UK (www.mirumagency.com), suggests that you can get a long way on just React; however if React is all you know it’s really going to limit your usefulness to an employer. “Someone who comes in and can only do React isn’t a lot of good because if something goes wrong you’ve got to have someone with the skills to find out where the defect’s coming in,” he tells us. And that’s where fully-fledged JavaScript developers can really make their mark.

If you set your mind to it, adding JavaScript to your skill set needn’t take long. “One of our developers came straight off one of these 12-week boot camps and she’s turned out amazing,” says Jonathan Bradford from Kota (www.kotacreative.co.uk). “There are great courses that you can do for next to nothing and if you get that on your CV then my eyes are going to light up because at the moment I’m dealing with people who only have limited knowledge of HTML, CSS and jQuery.”

2 Project management

Feeling agile? Step your career up a gear, take on some project management responsibility and start reaping the financial rewards (but don’t worry about Prince2)