What
Makes our IT Pay Surveys Different
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Why IT salary surveys have big problems...and how we fixed them. Rapidly evolving information technology jobs are often so unique in the universe of business employment that using passive or self-reporting surveying methods to obtain compensation benchmark data can yield extremely inaccurate results. That’s because of the common (and dreaded) problem of lack of standardization in IT job titles and what IT professionals actually do on-the-job. These days it is not uncommon to find specialists in .NET, Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, SAP/ABAP, and dozens of other programming language skills classified under generic "Programmer" or "Developer" titles for the purpose of determining their compensation. Or Linux, Unix, NT, Chrome, and mobile OS platform engineers and administrators lumped together under a broad "Administrator" of "Engineer" job title. The problem is that some skills are worth more in the marketplace than others so doing simple job title matches to industry salary surveys can easily result in underpaying or overpaying IT professionals. The job title mismatch dilemma 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 from HR departments. Making the situation worse is that compensation surveys from the largest HR consulting firms, including Towers Watson, Mercer, Hay, Hewitt/AON and others, don’t offer a solution via their off-the-shelf products. Employers must contract with them for expensive custom survey consulting. Our solution in
1994 was to create a new methodology that produced the
first salary surveys in North America to define and accurately benchmark “new
breed" IT positions in Web/I-net, e-Commerce, Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence, Unix andNT, Business Technology/Business
Systems Analysts, Information Security, SAP and other enterprise software
applications. The best part about our unique methodology is that it corrects for job title/job content mismatches by classifying surveyed participants according to what they do on-the-job and matching them to a standardized set of detailed job description. Only then do we input their compensatoin data in our survey engine. Then all you need to do to get the most accurate market benchmark available today is match your people to our job descriptions. It’s a labor-intensive and expensive way to achieve truly accurate and validated compensation benchmarking. It requires a deep grounding in technology and the nuances of IT professional employment. In addition to that grounding, Foote Partners uses its unprecedented access to 149,353 IT professionals in 2,405 public and private sector employers to overcome many obstacles to accurate tracking of IT compensation and workforce issues. Overall, our methodology produces better data screening and cleansing, 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 incorporates extreme validation and accuracy methods similar to ours. IT infrastructure positions originally formed the strong foundation for our research, however Foote Partners’ competitive distinction has long been its focus on critical new strategic and tactical IT-business hybrid 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. Our high-touch relationships with our 2,400 research partners have been forged over many years: developed from among the clients, colleagues, and associates of our senior research team of former McKinsey & Company, Towers Watson, Gartner and META Group consultants and analysts. We have access not only to their IT compensation databases but to management and rank-and-file workers, which facilitates the matching of job content with comparable job titles that enables the extraordinary accuracy and reliability of our surveys. We
survey salaries and skills pay job-by-job, city-by-city: 160 positions, 83
cities in the United States and Canada. There are no geographic multipliers used
in our research, no cost-of-living coefficients. Ours is constantly refreshed
‘real world’ salary and skills pay data.
Many 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 160 critical IT jobs are available in any combination for up to 83 US and Canadian cities. Our more than 2,000 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, TowersWatson, Hewitt/Radford/AON, 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 612 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: ·
18%
of participating organizations have $3 billion+ in sales/$15+ billion in total
assets ·
28%
of participating organizations earn more than $1 billion in annual revenues or
more than $3 billion in total
assets ·
46%
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) ·
[Public
sector] 5% have operating budgets of $500 million or more,
[nonprofit/educational sectors] 4% with operating budgets $100 million to less
than $500million
Since 1995 we have identified the key employers and market players in 83 cities and labor markets, and enlisted them as Foote Partners research partners. From our research partners we collect salary and skills pay information continuously. Every three months we update complete sets of salary and skills data for all FP positions in that location. TOur bottom line: We will not release data in any city until we have accurate representative data that have been verified and validated, covering all IT positions and all skills and certifications in our general survey. Surveying during these months... Produces research published...
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