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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.
Several aspects of Foote Partners’
compensation data collection methodology set us apart from other IT salary
survey firms.
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:
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.
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)
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. Surveying during these months... Produces research published...
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