IT Salaries Heading North in 2006

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

With demand for IT talent finally catching up with supply, companies can expect to pay more for help in the coming year.

2006 is looking good for IT professionals. Business confidence is prompting new technology spending which, in turn, is expected to translate into increased hiring and salaries.

The slight increase in compensation and hiring that occurred in 2005 will continue and escalate in 2006, increasing demand for all IT skills.

”There’s great news for the IT professional as we move into 2006. The job market in the U.S. is improving and is doing so quite rapidly,” said Scot Melland, president and CEO of Dice Inc., a leading provider of online recruiting for technology, engineer and security-cleared professionals.

While, over the past two years, there was an up-tick in the hiring of people with core technology skills, such as developers, systems analysts, database administrators and network engineers, salaries didn’t keep pace.

In fact, after a couple of years of salaries being flat to down, the first real rise in IT compensation, of 2.4% (or $66,300 to $67,900), was at the beginning of 2005, according to Dice surveys.

As 2006 nears, skilled IT workers can expect to see increased job opportunity and a rise in compensation of five percent or better, particularly in job categories where demand will outpace supply.

Reason to Smile

International recruiting firm, Robert Half Technology (RHT) and Janco, a Utah-based international consulting company doing salary surveys since the 1970s, corroborate the good career news for the IT sector.

In a recent survey of CIOs, recruiting firm Robert Half Technology found that 16% of executives had plans to hire full-time IT staff in the fourth quarter of 2005. Specialties experiencing the most growth, for this time period, are networking (19%); help desk/end user support (15%); application development (12%); data/database management (11%); and, information security (9%).

This article was first published on cioupdate.com. To read the full article, click here.