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 so unique in the universe of business
employment that using passive surveying methods to obtain compensation benchmark
data now yields extremely inaccurate results. Why? Because of the massive
mismatch problem that now exists between IT job titles and what these
professionals actually do on-the-job. The
“job title thing” 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. Making the
situation worse is that the most reputable HR consulting firms, including Towers
Perrin, William M. Mercer, Watson Wyatt, Hewitt, and Aon/Radford, refuse to
offer a solution via their off-the-shelf IT salary surveys:
You must contract with them for expensive custom survey consulting.
Our
solution more than 15 years ago was to create a new methodology---dubbed “IT
Insider”---that produced the first salary surveys in North America to define
and benchmark “new breed" IT positions and job families in Data
Warehousing/Business Intelligence, Unix, NT, Web/I-net, e-Commerce, and Business
Technology (1994-1995) and IT Security, SAP and other enterprise
software applications (1997). The
IT Insider method corrects for
job title/job content mismatches by reclassifying
surveyed participants according to what they do on-the-job and assigning to them
the most accurate job title before their pay data is loaded into our
survey data compilation engine. It
is time-consuming, expensive, and requires a deep grounding in technology and
the nuances of IT professional employment. Along
with having that unique grounding, Foote Partners has unprecedented access to IT
workers at more than 1,980 research partner employers. Overall,
our methodology
produces better
data screening and cleaning, 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 publishes off-the-shelf surveys
that use IT job title alignment methods. Our relationships with our research partners---many of whom
were clients, colleagues, and associates of our senior research team of former
McKinsey & Company, Towers Perrin, Gartner and META Group consultants and
analysts---have been forged over many years. We have access not only to their IT
compensation databases but to IT managers and workers to facilitate the
matching of job content with comparable job titles.
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 130 critical IT jobs are available in any combination for up to 84 US and Canadian cities. Our more than 1,600 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 424 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 --25% of participating organizations earn more than $1 billion in annual revenues or more than $3 billion in total assets --44% 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) --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, [nonprofit/educational sectors] 4% with operating budgets $100 million to less than $500million
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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