♦  IT Salary + Skills Pay Reports: Research Methodology

An "IT Insider" Approach to Correcting Profound Deficiencies in IT Salary Surveys

Why IT Salary Surveys Have Big Problems...and How Foote Partners Fixed Them

Rapidly evolving information technology jobs are so unique in the universe of business employment that using passive surveying methods to obtain compensation benchmark data now yields extremely inaccurate results. Why? Because of the massive mismatch problem that now exists between IT job titles and what these professionals actually do on-the-job.

The "job title thing" is an epidemic widely acknowledged by HR compensation professionals and IT salary surveyors alike. It affects more than half of all employed IT workers by even the most conservative estimates. Making the situation worse is that the most reputable HR consulting firms, including Towers Perrin, William M. Mercer, Watson Wyatt, Hewitt, and Aon/Radford, refuse to offer a solution via their off-the-shelf IT salary surveys: You must contract with them for expensive custom survey consulting.

The Foote Partners solution more than a decade ago was to create a new methodology--- dubbed "IT Insider"---that produced the first salary surveys in North America to define and benchmark "new breed" IT positions and job families in Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence, Unix, NT, Web/I-net, e-Commerce, and Business Technology (1994-1995) and IT Security, SAP and other enterprise software applications (1997).

The IT Insider method corrects for job title/job content mismatches by reclassifying surveyed participants according to what they do on-the-job and assigning to them the most accurate job title before their pay data is loaded into our survey data compilation engine. It is time-consuming, expensive, and requires a deep grounding in technology and the nuances of IT professional employment.

Along with having that unique grounding, Foote Partners has unprecedented access to IT workers at more than 1,980 research partner employers. Overall, their methodology produces better data screening and cleaning, superior statistical reliability and validity, and constantly refreshed and consistent ‘real world’ salary and tech skills pay data. No other IT compensation survey research firm today publishes off-the-shelf surveys that use IT job title alignment methods.

IT infrastructure positions form a strong foundation for this research, however Foote Partners’ competitive distinction has long been its focus on those critical new strategic and tactical positions often unreported (or under-reported) in other IT surveys. Findings are updated continuously and published every three months, aided by our constant flow of confidential IT compensation data from North American public and private sector employer HR departments and IT, HR, and business executives research partners

Foote Partners relationships with their research partners---many of whom were clients, colleagues, and associates of our senior research team of former McKinsey & Company, Towers Perrin, Gartner and META Group consultants and analysts---have been forged over many years. Foote has access not only to their IT compensation databases but also to IT managers and workers to facilitate the matching of job content with comparable job titles.

Foote Partners surveys IT compensation job-by-job, city-by-city: 130 positions, 82 cities in the United State and Canada. There are no geographic multipliers used in our research, no cost-of-living coefficients. Theirs is constantly refreshed ‘real world’ salary and skills pay data.

What Does Foote Partners Do That Most Others Don't?

• Foote Partners is the only firm in North America that corrects for job title/job content mismatches for surveyed workers before the survey data enters the data compilation phase. All their customers need to do is match their workers to Foote’s detailed, long form job descriptions that are regularly updated to keep up with changing job conditions.
• Foote Partners surveys the market values of more than 420 common IT skills and certifications, and as with all of their surveys, update the results every three months. So if you aren’t willing to re-title jobs to match actual content but you need to differentiate workers within a broad job title (such as "programmer" or "administrator"), you can use their skills survey data to adjust their base pay for the presence of various IT skills and therefore benchmark their base pay to job titles they should have.
• Foote Partners uses no aggregated data sources or compilation of other surveys, instead collecting their data job-by-job, city-by-city, continuously throughout the year. Findings are updated and published quarterly, aided by a constant flow of confidential compensation data from public and private sector HR departments and IT, HR, and business executive research partners. From Foote’s non-HR research partners, they receive the same compensation data their HR departments possess, typically delivered in electronic database, spreadsheet formats, or paper files. Foote’s validation techniques involve active interviewing and interaction with IT management and the rank-and-file workforce. Consultations with compensation experts help us to pinpoint the most influential employers in every target city and investigate local labor market and economic conditions that may be influencing staffing and pay issues.
• Foote Partners track critical labor market fluctuations and have an insider's knowledge of evolving technology. They keep a close watch on the movement of IT jobs in lines of business that bring IT workers in continual contact with customers - the so-call 'hybrid' IT jobs that now define the new breed of IT worker.
• Foote Partners’ uses an experienced team of former Gartner industry analysts, McKinsey & Company. Towers Perrin, and Wm. M. Mercer consultants, and former corporate HR, IT, and business executives, who have unprecedented access to more than 93,000 IT workers. They work closely with nearly 2,000 research partners to correct salary survey problems, which just begin with the job title/job content discontinuities mentioned above. Overall, Foote’s innovative methods produce better data screening and cleansing, superior statistical reliability and validity, and constantly refreshed and consistent ‘real world’ salary and tech skills pay data.

IT Salary and Cash Bonus Pay

Research participant metrics

• 13% of participating organizations have $3 billion+ in sales/$15+ billion in total assets
• 25% of participating organizations earn more than $1 billion in annual revenues or more than $3 billion in total assets
• 44% of participating organizations have $500+ million in sales/$1+ billion in total assets/$500+ million in premiums/$500+ million operating budget (government, educational, not-for-profit)
• 56% of participating organizations fall in the SMB (small-to-medium sized business) segment, generally defined as organization under $500 million in sales.
• [Public sector] 5% have operating budgets of $500 million or more, 4% with operating budgets $100 million to less than $500 million (nonprofit/government/educational sectors)