Skilled IT workers are raking in more bucks, according to a recent Foote Partners survey of U.S. and Canadian IT employees.
What's happening is that companies have begun to pay IT workers higher salaries based on their skills in addition to their job titles and the certificates hanging on their cubicle walls.
"It's no secret that employers have long been using skills pay to keep their IT workers at competitive market rates," says David Foote, CEO and chief research officer for Foote Partners. However, "more than half (51 percent) of IT professionals in our continuous survey of 54,000 IT professionals are receiving some form of additional pay for individual certifications and skills. That's a first. The implications of this are huge."
IT workers with System i certification are being compensated for those qualifications, but they aren't earning more than the average system administrator or engineer with skills on other platforms.
On the average, a system administrator or engineer with an IBM Certified Systems Expert i5/iSeries certification can expect to receive 8 percent of his or her base pay as either a bonus or an adjustment to base pay, Foote says.
Overall, an IT worker with one certified skill earns 8.3 percent of his or her base salary for skills pay while an employee with one non-certified skill earns 7.4 percent of his or her base salary for skills pay.
Among the best-compensated IT workers are project management professionals, who earn 14 percent of their base salary as skills pay, and certified information systems security professionals, with skills pay of 13 percent of their base salary. The highest-paid IBM certification employee is an IBM Certified Solutions Developer: WebSphere, receiving an additional 12 percent of base salary.
Increasing in value is the position of IBM DB2 Universal Database Certified Solutions Expert, which has seen a pay increase of 25 percent during the past six months.
Among the best-compensated non-certified IT jobs:
Extreme programmers, with skills pay of 16 percent of base salary.
Security skills with project assignments, with skills pay of 16 percent of base salary.
WebSphere skills, earning an additional 12 percent of base salary.
Non-certified IT fields that have been going up in value include positions involved with HTTP, HTML/DHTML, JBoss applications server, and JavaBeans/EJB, which have experienced a skills pay increase of 33 percent during the past six months.
If you're looking for ways to boost your bottom line, Cobol probably isn't your best bet. Workers with Cobol skills earn a just 2 percent above base pay.
It wasn't too long ago during the dot-com bust and subsequent economic recession, however, that no one was getting extra compensation for their IT skills. "A lot of companies during the recession stopped paying bonuses to a lot of people," Foote says. "Employers don't want to over pay. They want to re-price skills periodically while also addressing their internal skills requirements. But bonus programs vanished for many IT professionals during the economic recession. These bonus programs have returned, but the dominant practice today is to recognize IT certification and skills pay as part of workers' base salaries."
The Foote Partners study found that employers increasingly prefer to pay IT workers for their skills rather than tying compensation to job titles.
Often, job title has little bearing on the duties an IT worker actually performs — a long-standing, troublesome problem well known within the ranks of IT professionals, Foote says.
Since salary surveys are traditionally tied to job titles, worker morale and retention problems can result when a salary is clearly too low for the tasks the worker performs. "That absolutely hits systems programming and systems engineering because sometimes they don't even differentiate Linux from Unix from NT," Foote says.
Increasingly, companies are pricing jobs by incorporating pay for specific certified and non-certified IT skills key to performing the job and keeping the title unchanged. "It's a nightmare to go through the process of reclassifying and re-titling IT workers, and few employers want to tackle it," Foote says. "Even worse, IT jobs are changing so rapidly nowadays that you'd have to repeat this process regularly."
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