I work in the technology sector and so it was interesting to see the results of the latest US IT salary survey. Overall it looks like the median salaries for business technology professionals fell for the first time in 11 years. From 2007 to 2008, median base pay for IT staff fell to $73,000 from $74,000 and for managers it dropped from $97,000 to $96,000. This was probably due to the general economic slowdown which led to lower corporate spending and increased outsourcing thereby driving down internal labor costs. However, as the overall drops are not significant I don’t think you can read too much into the numbers yet.
Some other points of note from the survey were:
1. There are still some jobs that are seeing an uptick in salary, particularly those with Web design and Enterprise wide type roles (average salary is $92,000). Help desk/IT support roles came in with the lowest pay at an average of $51,000, which is still well above the average American income.
2. Certain regions are continuing to grow their need for IT staff while others are contracting. The greater Washington DC metro area (which encompass surrounding areas in Maryland and Northern Virginia) is growing thanks to government driven IT spending and demand. Whereas New York and New Jersey are contracting due to hard hit financial institutions that are laying off large numbers of staff.
3. There is still a significant gender gap in pay. Male IT staff earn a median salary of $75,000 versus $68,000 for female staff – a 9% gap. It was 13% a year ago, so I guess there has been an improvement on a year-on-year basis.
4. 55% of respondents say that there are fewer IT jobs available now because of outsourcing. Though only 22% say that this has led to salary reductions for employees.
My salary has gone up at the rate of inflation over the last 2 years, though my bonuses have been in line with what I am due under my employment contract. So I guess I am ahead of the curve for now. I think next years survey results (for 2008 trends) will probably be worse as 2008 will likely be another bad year for job growth and salary increases due to the impending recession and cutback in corporate spending. If you work in the technology sector you should be very cautious when if comes to your job and make sure you are a valued employee. The IT department is normally one of the largest cost centers for companies and so is the first to experience lay-offs and cutbacks when the focus is on reducing costs. The full survey can be found at InformationWeek.
On a lighter note, you could classify bloggers (or more formally web site authors), as business technology professionals. I am pretty sure blogger salaries will not be appearing in national salary surveys anytime soon, but what do you think the average blogger earns? If I was to project my annualized income from blogging – it would be in the hundreds and not thousands of dollars. I imagine this would be the same for a majority of other bloggers out there, apart from the one to five percent who actually make a pretty decent living from their blog.