Organizations are increasingly choosing to run their mission-critical workloads on OCI because of its ability to run any cloud workload with faster migration, lower cost to operate and on a more secure, globally available platform. As OCI customer adoption continues to grow, Oracle has increased investment in programs that provide support to customers and increase access to relevant, hands-on cloud skills training to help them get the most out of the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle’s new training program enables people to gain valuable cloud expertise that can be applied to any industry, enabling them to enhance their value and grow their careers. The free training and certification also helps to expand the IT talent pool, making it easier for businesses to acquire or develop the skilled professionals they need to grow and innovate quickly. Damien Carey, senior vice president, Oracle University, said:

“Throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen the IT skills gap become wider and more prominent than ever before due to our heightened reliance on high-tech and cloud skills. This gap not only impacts the people looking for meaningful careers but also companies seeking qualified professionals. By providing free training on arguably the fastest growing cloud technology in the industry, Oracle is helping individuals build the skills they need for successful careers and making it easier than ever for our customers to maximize the value of their Oracle Cloud investment.”

Oracle’s new program will include:

• Access to the entire digital OCI training catalogue which includes courses for all levels and multiple roles, accessible anytime and anywhere with 13 languages supported
• Hands-on labs through the Oracle Cloud free tier to enable practice in a live environment
• An end-to-end Oracle certification experience — from preparation courses and practice exams to testing and credentialing
• Live sessions taught by Oracle experts who cover best practices and provide personalized feedback
• Career resources to support those who are seeking new job opportunities

If you’re wondering how to earn higher pay as a developer, read on. Whether you’re an entry-level software engineer or one with years of experience, the following tips will help you maximize your software developer salary over the long term.

1. Choose a strategic specialization.

A basic rule for increasing your value–and, by extension, your salary as a programmer is to specialize in a niche with a shortage of competent developers. For example, consider mainframe programming. It may sound like an obscure, outdated field. But, according to ZipRecruiter, the average salary for mainframe programmers is about $106,000. That’s nearly double what ZipRecuirter reports as the average salary for programmers in general. So, before focusing on the most popular languages or platforms, consider whether you could specialize in a niche where you’ll face less competition.

2. Keep learning.

Even if you have already chosen a certain niche, it’s important to keep your skillset flexible and up-to-date as well, especially if you plan on moving from one job to another to earn a salary boost. Pay attention to hot languages or trends and invest some time in learning them. For instance, if you boast expertise in Rust you’ll put yourself in line to earn a median salary on the order of $135,000. That may come as a surprise to developers who graduated from CS programs even just a decade ago when few people were talking about Rust.

3. Be prepared to move.

As with jobs in most fields, you’re likely to hit a salary ceiling if you stay at any one company long enough. You may still get small increases in pay, but, to make major leaps, you’ll need to look for new positions. Planning to change programming jobs every four years is a healthy baseline, although some developers would recommend looking for a new position as often as every two years.

Whatever the exact length of your tenure at any one company, what really matters, in terms of software developer salary maximization, is being open to new developer job opportunities when they arise. Of course, if you want to stay in a particular role because you like the job and company, by all means, definitely do so.

4. Consider freelance programming work.

Another way to break through the salary ceiling that you’ll run into at most companies is to work as a freelance developer rather than in a full-time role. To be sure, there can be many downsides to working as a freelance programmer. However, one of the upsides is that you can often charge more than a company would pay you in a full-time role to do the same development work, especially if you fulfil an urgent but non-permanent need for your clients.

In other words, a business may not be willing to commit to hiring a developer full-time at a rate of $150/hour, which adds up to more than $300,000 per year, especially if it doesn’t have a permanent need for whichever skills that developer brings to the table. But the business may pay you at that rate for a couple of months to build an application or overhaul a legacy codebase.

5. Take advantage of stock options.

For some developers, achieving maximal compensation is about not just earning as much as possible in salary, but also taking advantage of stock options or other equity opportunities that their employers offer. It’s important to remember, of course, that equity is often not quite as lucrative in practice as it looks.

The value of stocks can fluctuate widely and quickly. What looks like a hefty sum in equity one day may turn out to be worth far less when you actually cash it out. The bite of capital gains taxes can reduce the value even further. And, if you work for a startup, any equity you are granted usually has no value whatsoever until the company is acquired or goes public.

There’s no “one dumb trick” or simple rule for maximizing your salary as a developer. But there are a variety of strategies that you can adopt alongside working hard and knowing your stuff, of course, to put yourself in a position to achieve maximum pay over the long term as a developer.

AI has not only generated profits for businesses but has also created numerous job opportunities. Recent studies reveal that individuals from both tech and non-tech backgrounds are aspiring to pursue a career in artificial intelligence, which will also fulfil the growing demands of skilled AI professionals in the tech industry.

This article provides a list of the top freelancing jobs for individuals aspiring to pursue an AI career.

• R Algorithm Developer: This job profile requires the candidate to perform machine learning operations like classification and regression. R programming provides various packages and features for developing AI neural networks.
• R Mentor: This opportunity is provided by a technology company with global operations and high-end partners. The company is looking for a mentor to work on R programming and assist others to help approach the problems concerning R. The estimated length for this job role is 2-4 weeks with remote working facilities.
• Model Interpretability Machine Learning: For this job role, the candidate has to build a machine learning model on a provided database by the recruiting company. The company will allow the selected candidate to choose from a list of platforms, according to one’s proficiency, based on which the application will be developed. The estimated period for this job is less than a month and allows remote working.
• AI Project Manager: This job entails working on implementing AI and machine learning onto e-learning platforms. The company is looking for a project manager who will assist and supervise a team of AI. The estimated duration for this role is 3 to 6 months for 30 hours per week.
• Software Developer to develop Research and Analysis Tool for Amazon: The company is looking for a full-stack software developer/web developer to make a research and analysis tool for Amazon. The tool would be cloud-based with front and backend development and CRM management. The duration of this role will be discussed after the candidate is hired.
• Data Scientist: This job requires an AI professional with over 4 years of experience in the field to develop a recommendation engine. The candidate must be familiar with different programming languages like R, Python, and Spark, and should also be adept in natural language processing. Excellent communication and collaboration skills will be a bonus to get hired. The duration of this job is 3 to 6 months with less than 30 hours of work per week.

• Topic Modeling (NLP) in Python: For this job, the candidate has to carry out topic modelling of reviews using LDA or any other procedures best suited for the job. The candidate has to use the trial-and-error method until an optimal number of the most distinct topics is reached. The candidate also has to use AI algorithms to classify new reviews into topics. The company is looking for someone with intermediate experience in the field and is providing remote working facilities.