How much are you worth?

Every year in September, Redmond Magazine publishes an annual salary survey for Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCP's).   RedmondMag bills itself as, "the authoritative, independent voice of the Microsoft IT community."  RedmondMag is Microsoft friendly, but they have no ties, financial or otherwise, to Microsoft.  You can download this year's salary survey using this link.  I recently reviewed this year's salary survey and wanted to give you my impressions.

This year's survey continued the recent trend of becoming shorter every year.  The 2006 survey was 23 pages long.  The 2007 survey was 18 pages long.  This year's survey was only 12 pages long.  Even though this year's survey is thin reading, it is still the best of its kind, and I don't know of a better one that is Microsoft centric.

You need to realize that there are some limitations for this survey.  It is strictly a USA survey in $USD currency, so international MCP's are not represented.   Another gap is that not all technology areas are represented - either by the editor's choice (example: Dynamics - Navision expertise) or due to lack of survey respondents (example:  Microsoft's new BI Developer certification).  In the case of Navision, that is an unfortunate omission, since it is a hot area where demand exceeds supply. 

Another major limitation of the survey is that it doesn't take into account regional fluctuations of salary.   For example, salaries are higher in the Northeast and in California than in the rest of the USA.  Also, don't forget that this survey was completed prior to the recent stock market decline.

Once you get past the cosmetic stuff and understand the limitations, there is a lot of good info.   Here are some highlights taken from this year's survey:

• For the fourth consecutive year, salaries, bonuses and job stability have all risen
• Demand for I.T. continues to increase
• Computer Science enrollment in universities is down by 20 percent, which helps existing I.T. professionals who already have these skills
• MCP's reported an average base salary increase of a very healthy 8 percent, beating the 5.5 percent inflation rate in the USA.
• The average age of the respondents was 43, and one in five reported a six figure base salary
• The ratio of men to women continues to be 6 to 1
• Hot technology areas include programming leads (.Net), Project Server, BizTalk, Windows 2008, and SQL Server DBA.
• 6 percent of the survey respondents have been laid off in the last year
• 7 percent of survey respondents reported that they either had already lost their job to outsourcing or were anticipating losing their job to outsourcing
• 40 percent of survey respondents reported that they do not receive any bonuses, while 25% reported receiving bonuses totaling $5000 or more.

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