Special Bonus - Free Copy of the 2009 Foote Partners IT Skills Trend Report

Compensation for IT professionals has traditionally been tied to their job titles. The problem is that job titles rarely match up with what they actually do on-the-job, making most IT salary surveys unreliable and causing serious staff retention and motivation problems when pay equity issues arise. Continually updating each worker’s job titles? Unrealistic and virtually impossible.

Foote Partners solved this dilemma with a unique proprietary research methodology devised in 1997 that:

• Corrects for job title mismatches with job content by reclassifying survey participants before inputting their pay into the survey engine
• Isolates and surveys pay premiums for 406 IT skills critical to job performance
• Tracks and updates compensation for 89,100 IT professionals every 3 months

SALARY AND SKILLS COMPENSATION COVERED IN THIS REPORT: SAP (Canada)

PAY DATA FOR 64 U.S., 18 CANADIAN CITIES NOW AVAILABLE

RESEARCH PARTICIPANT METRICS

The size of the participating organizations, measured most appropriately for the type of business, by revenues, assets, total premiums and operating budgets, are as follows

• 13% of participating organizations have $3 billion+ in sales/$15+ billion in total assets
• 24% of participating organizations earn more than $1 billion in annual revenues or more than $3 billion in total assets
• 43% 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)
• In the Public Sector, 5% have operating budgets of $500 million or more, 4% with operating budgets $100 million to less than $500million (nonprofit/government/educational sectors)

HOW DOES FOOTE PARTNERS COLLECT SURVEY DATA?

Foote Partners distinction is its completely unique compensation survey methodology that solves the widespread problem of IT job titles that don't match what workers actually do on-the-job—a serious problem plaguing major IT salary surveys today that use traditional data collection methods tied to job titles. Foote Partners highly specialized proprietary IT data collection methodology and analytical techniques accurately corrects for job title mismatches before the survey data enters their survey data compilation engine to produce extraordinary accuracy, validity, and reliability.

A constant flow of confidential compensation data is received directly from HR departments and hundreds of senior IT and business executive “research partners” with whom Foote Partners senior research team have forged relationships over decades as former industry analysts and consultants at top firms like McKinsey & Company, Gartner, Towers Perrin and Wm. M. Mercer. There is no aggregation of data sources or compilation of other firms' surveys. Foote is then able to spend more of their efforts correcting job titles that don’t match what workers actually do on-the-job, plus using multiple validation techniques for ensure the most reliable and accurate surveys possible.

Foote Partners’ primary research reports for IT skills and professional certifications pay are the Quarterly IT Salary + Skills Pay Survey Reports and the IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index^TM (ITSCPI) , which tracks premium pay for 406 IT certifications and skills. All surveys are updated continuously and published every 3 months. Each quarterly edition has been compiled from confidential information shared with Foote Partners by HR and IT executives during the same quarter.

IT Skills and Certifications Pay

Employers have been paying extra for in-demand IT skills for some time but they are notoriously reluctant to create formal programs to do so. Why? Because they want to pay for skills selectively without feeling obligated to pay all holders of any one skill or certification equally, or even at all. This makes it much more labor intensive and expensive for survey researchers to capture such data, and many have tried and failed.

Foote Partners’ IT skills pay surveys remain the industry’s oldest (1999), most comprehensive, and most accurate benchmark surveys of their kind. The firm’s unique data collection methodology lends itself very well to capturing both informal and formal pay practices, and to do it economically. This survey reveals that more than one half of all private and public sector IT workers in our North American survey receive some form of skills pay, and of that number they are able to both document and validate skills pay data for approximately 48 percent, or approximately 23,000 IT workers.