According to the study, overall average pay for 103 non-certified skills surveyed grew 4.4 percent for the year ending April 1. That compares favorably to the past six years of a down IT economy, when the average pay for a technical skill without formal certification declined 30 percent.

Foote could not be reached for comment despite repeated attempts.

The latest data shows that for the first time since Foote's maiden quarterly study in 2000 there is positive annual growth for every category of non-certified skills tracked.

The non-certified tech skills that have been gaining ground over the last year include operating systems; applications development tools and languages; networking/Internetworking; Web/e-commerce development; and enterprise applications development.

Other hot non-certified skills include Active Server Pages, Java/J2EE, JBoss applications server, Linux, MySQL, RAD/Extreme Programming, Visual Basic, Microsoft .Net, Visual J++, IBM WebSphere and WML.