Salaries for IT professionals are at a five-year low, and IT managers and staffers alike are feeling less secure about their jobs, according to a survey by InformationWeek, a trade magazine for technology professionals.
Salaries for IT managers dipped to $89,000 from an average $97,000 a year ago, while IT staffers’ compensation fell to $63,000 from $71,000, the survey said.
Rusty Weston, research editor of InformationWeek, said the decreases can be attributed to salary freezes and the absence of year-end bonuses. Researchers did see slight cost-of-living gains in base pay, he said.
Out of the more than 10,000 IT professionals surveyed, nearly 6 percent said they were unemployed. More than 60 percent of the unemployed said they had been laid off since Sept. 11.
Two in five of the unemployed said they received no severance package and 27 percent said they got less than a month of severance pay.
There are fewer jobs out there, but the best bets are IT specialist positions, particularly in wireless networking and network security, Weston said. “It depends upon the industry. I don’t think we have the information that would enable us to say a recovery is coming.”
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