How is the data presented?*  

Skills and certifications pay in the ITSCPI is displayed as a percent of base pay, a normative view that is also the most common form in which they are paid.  We display three data points for each skill or certification: 10^th percentile; 50th percentile (median); 90^th percentile.

Sample of this report

What is IT skills and certification pay?

It is common practice today for employers to isolate, recognize and reward experience in a variety of technical skills. Pay for such skills, both certified and noncertified, is usually provided in the form of a premium employers are willing to pay workers who possess high-value technical skills used on the job (with or without certifications for those skills).  This pay is may be applied in the form of a cash bonus or it may be embedded in base salary to adjust for the presence of a dominant vendor or technology; for example an Oracle Database Administrator, Linux Systems Administrator, Unix Programmer, or SAP Developer. 

Incorporating skills premiums in base pay is the most popular option today. Why? Because it is an effective solution to the dreaded long-standing problem of job titles that don't match what people actually do on-the-job. These days it is common to find Linux, Unix, and NT administrators lumped together under a single "Systems Administrator" titles. Or .NET, Java, SAP, and Cobol specialists all with "Programmer" or "Developer" titles. But some of these skills are worth more that others in the marketplace. Benchmarking salaries of these various specialists to a single job title in a salary survey typically results in salary mismatches.

In an ideal world you would simply change the persons job title to reflect the skill specializations. For example, software developers who work exclusively with Java become "Java Developers" and administrators in the Linux world "Linux Administrators". But there are barriers to doing this at many employers and consequently much resistance. Instead, why not differentiate workers within common job titles by offering skills premium pay in order to match their pay to to the job titles they should have?  It's a lot less difficult than going through a laborious job evaluation process and has become a common industry practice. This is where our IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index comes in handy: it tells you exactly what the bonus or base pay adjustment should be for 524 certified and noncertified IT skills, based on current compensation practice at 2,257 employers.

Are there other uses for skills pay?  Absolutely. Skills pay can be offered as an inducement in recruiting a prospective employee via internal transfer, or securing external candidates on the open market as a basis for a sign-on bonus.  Skills pay can also used as a de facto retention bonus. This may be without regard to other variables such as low/no-cash incentives, merit and bonus pay not connected to specific skills (e.g. profit sharing), work/lifestyle benefits, and other important add-ons not tied specifically to cash compensation for individual performance.

Is a certain level of performance necessary to receive a skill or certification premium?  Our research indicates that while some employers may attach a performance basis for skills payout, others do not. The trend is towards companies devising measurable performance hurdles whenever possible.

How does Foote Partners collect skills & certification pay data?  

Foote Partners’ primary research report for skills and professional certifications pay is the IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index (ITSCPI), which tracks premium pay for 503 IT certifications and noncertified skills and is continuously updated and published every three months. Updated data in this edition was collected through January 1, 2012, including 31,850 validated IT professionals receiving premium pay for their skills and/or certifications.  

Employers have been paying for tech 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 labor intensive and expensive for survey researchers to capture such data.  Though many have tried to track skills pay, Foote Partners’ ITSCPI---launched in 1999---is not only the oldest and (now) only survey of its kind still in existence, but also the industry’s most comprehensive and most accurate.

Our unique data collection methodology lends itself very well to capturing both informal and formal pay practices, and to do it more economically.  Our survey reveals that more than one half of the private and public sector IT workers in our North American survey receive some form of skills pay, and of that number we are able to both document and validate skills pay data for approximately 48 percent of them.  From our HR department and non-HR research partner sources we receive all formal and informal IT compensation data in the form of electronic databases, spreadsheets, and hard copy.

With this critical data in hand, Foote Partners spends significant time on the delicate and critical task of validating the data including direct interviewing and aggressive interactive surveying. We do not collect skills pay data from workers themselves, but instead from their managers and HR/compensation staffs.

We collect and compile the data continuously and make those results available to our retainer and consulting customers only:  everybody else may obtain more than 30 individual quarterly updated ‘off-the-shelf’ compensation surveys published and regularly updated by Foote Partners that contains excerpts from the ITSCPI report.

The ITSCPI reports pay in the following classifications, for full-time IT workers only (these premiums do not apply to contractors or consultants):

Research participant metrics

IT compensation data for our 2012 research findings were collected from 2,257 public and private sector organizations representing more than 40 private sector industries plus government and educational institutions. Data from 123,400 IT workers were included in these findings.  

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

-- 25% of participating organizations have $1 billion or more in annual revenues or $3 billion or more in total  assets

-- 44% of participating organizations have $500+ million in sales/$3+ 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 $500million (nonprofit/government/educational sectors)