The skills pay for IT professionals increased last year after a three-year slump. According to a study recently released by IT research consultancy, Foote Partners, IT skills pay for certified and non-certified tech skills in 2004 increased 1% and 4%, respectively.

The skills pay reported quarterly in Foote Partners' Hot Technical Skills and Certifications Pay Index is typically paid in the form of cash bonuses, or added to base salary in recognition of a vendor or technical skill that's critical to the job, says the research company.

"At this time last year the skills pay numbers were terrible," says David Foote, Foote Partners co-founder and chief research officer, in a statement. "There were overall annual declines of 6% to 8% - and an even worse two-year drop of 11% to 23%, respectively for the certified and non-certified skills tracked in our survey research."

Foote Partner reports that the overall median average pay for the 88 non-certified skills it tracks, which includes networking/internetworking and messaging/groupware skills, grew 1% over the past year, to 6.7% of base salary. This category suffered an 8% decline in skills pay in 2003.

According to the research, the top non-certified skills that grew in value in 2004 include messaging/groupware (6% of base pay in 2004 vs. 5.5% in 2003) and networking/internetworking (7.1% vs. 6.6%).

In the networking world, the highest paying non-certified skills last year were VoIP and Gigabit Ethernet. Storage/storage-area networking was also highly paid, the survey reports.

Database and Web/e-commerce skills were named as two non-certified skills that lost value in 2004.

Of the 62 certified skills surveyed, the overall median average pay grew 4% last year, to 7.9% of base pay, following a 5.6% decline in 2003, according to the research. The certified skills categories that grew in value were networking (9.5% of base pay in 2004 vs. 8.5% in 2003) and systems administration and engineering/NOS (8.3% vs. 7.6%).

Among the certifications that commanded the highest salary in 2004, include Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert, Cisco Certified Enterprise Administrator, and Certified Information Systems Security Professional.

The researchers say there are a number of reasons why skills pay is on the rise, including fear of losing talented employees, the return of mergers and acquisitions (particularly in the telecoms and software fields) driving demand for skilled systems integrators and project managers, and the pressures of government regulations.

Jon Brodkin is senior writer at Network World.