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An "IT Insider" Approach to Correcting
Profound Deficiencies
in IT Salary Surveys
Why IT salary surveys have big
problems...and how we fixed them.
There’s more salary
survey data around than ever before for determining pay for IT professionals. But it’s a minefield of
poorly validated surveys results, stale or oddly surveyed data,
or it’s difficult to match your positions by title. Fact is, information technology jobs are so unique in the universe of
business employment that using traditional passive surveying methods to obtain
compensation benchmark information yields extremely inaccurate results.
In the early 1990’s our research team developed
a completely different survey method – later dubbed “IT insider” by Foote
Partners – that corrected forever the serious problem of unreliable IT salary
and skills pay surveys. It used this methodology to pioneer the first salary
surveys in North America to define and benchmark “new breed" IT positions
in Data Warehousing, Unix, NT, Web, e-Commerce, and Business Technology (1994 -
1995) and Information Security and Enterprise Software Applications (1997).
The
“IT Insider” method corrects for
IT job title/job content mismatches so widely
acknowledged by HR compensation professionals and IT salary surveyors alike as the
plague on modern IT surveys using traditional data collection methods. How bad
is the problem?
Enough to create fundamental inconsistencies
that effectively
invalidate nearly all existing passive IT salary surveys that are organized
by job title.
Solving
the problem requires reclassifying surveyed participants so their job titles
match their actual job content before a worker’s data is loaded into
the survey engine. It is
time-consuming, expensive, and off-limits to any firm that does not have a deep
grounding in both technology and the nuances of IT professional employment.
But unlike other HR compensation consulting
firms, Foote Partners has that IT grounding and is better able to keep pace with
the rapidly evolving IT work force
and produce superior research. More than 1,300 employers have purchased and used our
surveys to benchmark their IT talent.
What we do that others don't
Several aspects of Foote Partners’
compensation data collection methodology set us apart from other IT salary
survey firms.
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We are 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 our customers need to do
is match their workers to our detailed, long form job descriptions that
are regularly updated to keep up with changing job conditions.
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We survey the market values of 330 common IT skills
and certifications, and as with all of our 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 our 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.
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We
use no aggregated data sources or compilation of others' surveys,
instead collecting
our 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 our non-HR research partners we receive the same compensation
data their HR departments possess, typically delivered in electronic
database, spreadsheet formats, or paper files. Our 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.
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We track
critical labor market fluctuations and have an insider's knowledge of
evolving technology. We 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.
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Foote Partners’ uses an experienced team of former Gartner
and META Group industry analysts, McKinsey & Company and Towers Perrin
consultants, and former corporate HR, IT, and business executives, who
have unprecedented access to more
than 78,000 IT workers. We work
closely with our nearly 1,900 research partners to correct salary survey
problems, which just begins with the job title/job content discontinuities
mentioned above. Overall, our 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.
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We can use our database to generate
custom surveys and reports on a variety of IT and business management
trends and better/best practices, serving as the foundation for our
consulting practices.
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IT salary and cash bonus pay
Survey results
from our quarterly IT
survey of more than 115 critical IT jobs are available in any combination for
up to 84 US and Canadian cities. Our
more than 1,300 salary and skills pay survey customers decide exactly what they need and how much to spend.
While
infrastructure positions form a strong foundation for our research, Foote
Partners’ competitive distinction has long been its focus on those critical
new strategic and tactical positions often unreported (or under-reported) in
IT surveys published by large firms such as Mercer, Watson Wyatt, Hewitt,
Aon/Radford, Towers Perrin, and others. Findings are updated and published
every three months
Long-form
JDs
accompany all orders so there’s no confusion.
For info on obtaining detailed long-form job descriptions see:
IT
certifications
and skills pay
Foote Partners' Quarterly
IT Skills & Certifications Pay Index and Salary/Bonus and Skills
Pay Combination Reports are the popular choices for hundreds of employers
seeking to differentiate pay for workers possessing various technical
certifications or skills. The market values of 330 IT skills and certifications are compiled and published every three
months, with data from North American and European employers.
Research
participant metrics
IT compensation data for our 2007 research findings were collected from 1,860
public and private sector organizations representing more than 30 private sector
industries plus government and educational institutions.
Approximately 78,000 IT workers are included in our continuously
updated surveys.
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/$3+ billion in total
assets/$500+ million in premiums/$500+ million operating budget (government,
educational, not-for-profit)
--5%
have operating budgets of $500 million or more, 4% with operating
budgets $100 million to less than $500million
(nonprofit/government/educational sectors)
--[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 do we get such accurate data in so many cities?
It takes us approximately
eighteen months to fully survey a new city or labor market----to identify the key employers and
market players in a single city or labor market, and then collect sufficient
accurate information to be able to offer, on a quarterly basis, regularly
updated complete sets of salary
and skills data for all FP positions in that location. We will not release data
in any city until we have accurate representative data that have been verified and validated,
covering all IT positions in our general survey. Every year we release data for new
cities and new IT positions.
Survey
frequency and availability
We are the only source in
North America for continuous quarterly IT salary survey research. This has made Foote
Partners the popular choice for companies who know that while some IT positions
need annual surveying, others require more frequent comparisons to keep up with
volatile labor market segments.
Surveying during these months...
Produces research published...
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1st Qtr
(January, February, March) |
April 10th |
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2nd
Qtr
(April, May, June) |
July 10th |
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3rd
Qtr
(July,
August, September) |
October
10th |
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4th
Qtr
(October, November, December) |
January 15 (following year) |
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