Bengaluru pays the highest salaries and it is hardware & networking professionals, not techies, who bag the best pay, says a LinkedIn salary study based on the data on its platform. The average weighted compensation in Bengaluru is Rs 12 lakh a year, followed by Mumbai and Delhi-NCR at Rs 9 lakh each, report Shilpa Phadnis and Avik Das.Hardware & networking jobs fetch about Rs 15 lakh a year (weighted average, as per importance) while software jobs fetch about Rs 12 lakh, and consumer jobs Rs 9 lakh — making up the three most paying industries in India.The hardware jobs being paid highly are not the traditional ones, but those in the area of chip design and newage networking, experts said. Shivananda Koteshwar, head of design R&D at semiconductor tools company Synopsys India, said in the area of VLSI (very-largescale integration), salaries have exploded because a lot of chip design implementation has moved to India. VLSI is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining hundreds of thousands of transistors or devices into a single chip. He said this was particularly true for physical design engineers. “Just two years ago, their salaries were 3-times their years of experience, today it is 4.5 to 5 times the experience,” Koteshwar said.On networking, V C Gopalratnam, CIO (international), Cisco, said the network is at the centre of a maelstrom of change taking place in enterprises and forms the foundation of digital transformation. “As massive amounts of data continue to be distributed ever more widely, customers are facing challenges around complexity and security. To address this, there is a lot of innovation happening in the networking space and it is increasingly becoming more sophisticated. And as the sophistication of networks increase, the demand for networking roles and skills are increasing,” he said.In software, new digital technologies are once again creating a fresh spiral of salary increases. AI and machine learning salaries are exploding. Viral Shah, cofounder and chief executive of Julia Computing, said bilingual programmers – those who are not only good at programming, but also understand a domain deeply – are also being paid handsomely. “The domain expertise may be business, engineering, finance, scientific, or medical. As an example, an AI programmer who has a biomedical engineering background is more likely to build the next generation medical device,” he said.The consumer packaged goods industry, including those like Hindustan Unilever, P&G and Britannia, may not where it once used to be. But Ritesh Rana, vice president HR of Britannia, told TOI that leading companies in the segment typically hire from top-tier B-schools, and are still amongst the most sought after employers on campus. “The growth opportunities and span of control offered by this sector are typically way more intense, exciting and broader than any other sector. As a result, the sector forms an attractive talent pool and a poaching ground. So maintaining a competitive compensation structure becomes imperative,” he said.In the LinkedIn study, Bengaluru emerged as the city where the weighted average compensation was the highest, at Rs 12 lakh, followed by Mumbai and Delhi-NCR at Rs 9 lakh each. Hyderabad stood at about Rs 8.5 lakh and Chennai at Rs 6.3 lakh. Based on submissions on the platform, the highest paying titles in the country are director of engineering, chief operating officer, executive director, vice president sales, and senior program manager. LinkedIn has launched a salary insights tool on its platform in India, where it has more than 50 million users, the second highest in the world after the US. It has been collecting data through this over the past two months. As more users provide data, the insights will become better.“In India’s competitive jobs market, LinkedIn Salary will help create salary transparency and empower our members with reliable data on what companies are paying today, what kind of compensation packages to expect, and how salaries vary as per industries and educational qualifications,” LinkedIn India products head Ajay Datta said.