Employers seek workers with range of skills, study finds

Employers want to hire someone who's got it all -- from technology and math skills to writing and collaboration abilities -- and they're willing to pay, according to a new research by Bentley University and Boston job matching company Burning Glass Technologies.

A social media job, for example, may pay about $62,000 a year, but marketing, human relations, or sales positions that require workers to think analytically and use interpersonal skills as well as use technology paid between $70,000 and $100,000 a year.

A person with a liberal arts background and a fluency in database languages fetched earnings of more than $120,000 a year, the research found.

"2016 looks to be the year of the hybrid job – and the hybrid employee," said Gloria Larson, president of Bentley University in Waltham. "The more schools can think about integrating across disciplines and getting students to dive deeper in cross-disciplinary ways is really helpful to breeding this kind thinking, to developing analytical skills."

The research analyzed key jobs and skills across nine job categories, including marketing, human resources, and data analysis, from 24.5 million U.S. company job listings between September 2014 and August 2015. Among the findings:

-- The top three skills needed across multiple job categories include: business development, data base systems management, and mathematics.

-- In the Information Technology sector, openings for "Big Data" jobs have grown nearly 4,000 percent since 2011. The average salary is $123,057.

-- Cybersecurity analyst jobs in New England paid $108,522, compared to $88,298 in the Midwest.