IT Wages Creeping Back to Pre-2001 Levels

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 21:06:00 GMT

A recent Information Week magazine article describes their survey of IT salaries. As in the last few years, data integration, ERP, data warehouse, and data mining wages rank at the top of IT pay scales.

Where The Money Is
Data mining and data warehouse, human resources IT, Web infrastructure, ERP, and enterprise application integration job functions bag the largest pay packages for IT managers. The lowest-paying spots are for networking, training, and IT support, jobs where median pay is 60% of the top-tier categories. Job titles matter, too. IT staffers with titles of architects and sales support engineers crack $100,000 in median pay. There's much buzz about the importance of project management, but that title, with median pay of $93,000, falls short of the tech elite. Seven staff job categories pay median total compensation of more than $80,000 a year; last year, only four categories topped that figure.

Unfortunately, this increase has widened the gender gap in IT salaries:

The persistent salary gap between women and men, especially in management, got larger this year. Male IT staffers command a median base salary of $70,000, compared with $64,000 for women IT staffers, a 9% difference. Among IT managers, men are earning an average of 15% more than women in base salary this year, compared with 10% more in 2005. Throw in bonuses, and the gap gets larger: Male staffers make $8,000 (12%) more, and male managers $14,000 (16%) more.

It seems to me that we in the information management field rank fairly high on the salary scale graphic. Enterprise Application Integration ranks first, with data mining coming in third, and database design and analysis coming in eighth, just under application development.

Karen Lopez: Musings on Data, Process, and Architecture

IT Wages Creeping Back to Pre-2001 Levels