11COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCES AND SUPPORT SERVICES

⚠⚠⚠ One job title and two occupations, moving in opposite directions. Database ADMINISTRATORS earn a $104,620 median and are projected at 0% growth over 2025-35; database ARCHITECTS earn $139,500 and are projected at +9% — with FEWER people and MORE annual openings. ⚠⚠ And Florida has no undergraduate database degree at all: the dedicated code produces 62 credentials a year and 61 are one UWF master's. So the specialism is assembled from courses, under seven competing statewide numbers in three different colleges.

Software developers design, build and maintain the systems everything else runs on. ⚠ A median of $135,980 nationally and $130,980 in Florida, on a bachelor's degree, and among the highest-paid on this site — above every two-year route and behind only computer hardware engineering. ⚠⚠ It is a CHOICE path: no single major owns it. Counted degrees show computing majors supplying under a third of working developers and ENGINEERING supplying nearly as many. ⚠⚠⚠ And it is the only career here you can enter with no degree at all — about one developer in five has none.

Cybersecurity analysts defend an organisation's systems and data — hardening configurations, monitoring for intrusion, responding to incidents, testing defences by attacking them, and investigating breaches after the fact. ⚠ A median of $129,180 and 21% projected growth, the fastest of any computing path on this site. ⚠⚠⚠ And the thing nobody says in the advertising: this is NOT an entry-level field. The federal handbook is explicit that analysts typically arrive from systems administration, and a security credential with no operational experience behind it is the commonest disappointment in this job market. This page covers four related roles.

Network and systems administrators build and run the infrastructure everything else sits on — switches, routers and wireless, servers and virtualisation, directory services, cloud platforms, backup and monitoring. ⚠ A median of $99,130, reachable from an associate degree, at 56 Florida institutions — the widest computing footprint in the state. ⚠⚠⚠ But read the outlook honestly: this occupation is projected to DECLINE, and so is the support work below it. The growth is in the two rungs above. This page covers the whole ladder and says where to aim.

⚠⚠⚠ Web and digital interface designers earn $104,000 against graphic designers' $62,960 — $41,040 for closely related skill pointed at screens rather than print, and BLS expects one to grow and the other to shrink. ⚠⚠ Florida awards 1,133 credentials in this CIP family and NOT ONE is a bachelor's, while BLS gives a bachelor's as the typical entry. The degree-holders came from somewhere else.

Data scientists turn messy data into decisions — cleaning and preparing it, building and validating statistical and machine-learning models, and explaining the result to people who will act on it. ⚠ There is no licence, no entrance examination and, for most people now working in the field, no data science degree: the occupation is older than the major.