Looking to earn more? Just change your job!

Stop depending on your current employer for a salary hike and just change your job to get the desired pay package. Year 2015 is a great one for professionals who are expecting an average of 25-27% increase.

Professionals moving to the eCommerce sector will get the best pay boost and those shifting to such companies from sectors such as Information Technology, fast-moving consumer goods and retail could see salaries rise 35-50%, with stock options often taking the total increase to over 100%.

As per a study by global recruitment company Kelly Services-'The Indian Workforce on the Move in 2015'- lateral hires in the financial services, IT and IT enabled services (ITeS) sectors will get an average hike of 25%, compared with 20-22% last year.

Even the manufacturing sector would see an increase of average 25% against last year’s 22%.

However, the pharma sector will remain stable at 25%.

Meanwhile, Aon Hewitt's Annual Salary Increase Survey stated the average increment offered across sectors by Indian companies this year was about 10.6%, going up to 12.4% for eCommerce.

Also, firms will be very active in hiring people and even buying out their period.

"Organisations are being more aggressive in offering salary hikes based on criticality of skills and the sense of urgency in order to buy talent faster than competition," Kamal Karanth, Managing Director of Kelly Services and KellyOCG India, told Economic Times.

Karanth added that niche skills would command a premium and the maximum hike expected in such roles was 50-55%.

"This year is all about high-skilled talent and stupendous growth in salaries for such profiles," Rituparna Chakraborty, co-Founder and senior Vice-President of Team-Lease Services, told ET.

Shanthi Naresh of HR consultancy Mercer said hot skills that get a premium vary from industry to industry.

"For example, in the consumer and pharma industries, it is sales and marketing skills. In the technology industry, it is skills such as data sciences, business intelligence, gaming, digital and online marketing, cloud and distributed computing,” she told the financial daily.

Meanwhile, as per Mercer’s recent survey, while the headcount of companies hiring has more or less remained the same from the past year, positive hiring sentiment is being fuelled by the addition of a large number of new organisations, especially in the eCommerce and technology space.