What Types of Skills -- Beyond General "SOA" -- are Employers Willing to Pay a Premium For?

From my perspective, I wonder if more of the job descriptions for senior developers contain "SOA" in them, thus resulting in a correlation between SOA and higher salaries. I can't speak to what employers are willing to pay a premium for, but in terms of skills that are harder to come by, I would service security technologies (e.g. WS-Security, WS-Trust, X.509, SAML) at or near the top of the list. While many companies may be using HTTP Basic Auth or WS-Security Username Token Profile with service accounts, anyone who's trying to do identity pass-through across heterogenous platforms, or deal with external partners has a greater challenge, and I haven't run into far fewer developers with significant experience in this space.

The second technology area is XML Schema. While most developers should understand the basics around manipulating XML, the nuances of XML schema design are not as well known, since so many developers rely on generated XML documents and generated XML schemas. Down the road, when those schemas must be interchanged among multiple systems, a lack of XML schema experience can be problematic.

I don't add REST to the list, mainly because I see too many companies who equate REST to POX over HTTP, which it's not. In reality, experience doing resource design is probably an even rarer skill, but it's probably just as rare to find a typical large enterprise who's embracing REST correctly.

Good customer skills have always—and will always—command a premium. A good SE will make more money than a developer with equal years of experience.

You can see this differentiation in the SOA world as well. SOA initiatives will pull in a lot of different stakeholders. SOA cuts across departments and challenges status quo. Some people feel threatened by this; but others recognize and embrace the new opportunities. It's the people who can thrive in this environment, who drive projects to completion, and can effectively bring people together that will do well—in other words, those with customer skills applied to an internal customer. These are the people that employers will recognize and reward.

Agree with Todd that security-related skills are likely extremely valuable to companies. Scott also makes the point that customer skills are of value. The skills with the greatest premiums are likely to be business communication skills -- those that can evangelize SOA to the business, and have an in-depth understanding of the technologies that will make things work.

SOA skills are function or job related. The skills required for a SOA Developer could be different from the desired skills for SOA Architect and the skills employees willing to pay a premium for SOA Systems Analyst are also different (see the post Defining SOA http://avirosenthal.blogspot.com/2007/12/definig-soa.html in my blog).
I agree with Joe and Scot that business communication skills are the most valuable for all SOA jobs.
The other common skill is thinking Reuse. However, it is difficult to evaluate this proposition.
specific to job skills:
Developer - XML,Integration technologies knowledge and Security.
Systems Analyst - Understanding the Business, Business Processes skills and understanding of SOA Patterns.
The SOA Architect most relevant skills are Enterprise Architecture skills and Data Architecture understanding and experience.
As far as the SOA Consultant is concerned see the post Choosing a SOA Consultant http://avirosenthal.blogspot.com/2010/01/choosing-soa-consultant.html.

One of the Important requirements is the BPM skills. BPM is understood by the management or operations only with Business processes. This is one of the most sought after skill. I agree to scott that with SOA, BPM and communication skills one can reach the top in competition.

Kalim
Sr ARchitect

SOA modeling skills with BPM with EDA is a hot skill to get high $$. Without this top-down design creating services becomes 'bunch of services' with high maintainability costs in a long run.