* Foote Partners skills pay report for Q4 2006
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Foote Partners has released its most recent quarterly skills pay survey and guess what … bonus pay for non-certified IT skills is up and skills pay for certified skills is down … again. The average premium pay for non-certified workers grew from 7.0% in Q4 05 to 7.6% of base pay in Q4 06. Average skills pay for certified skills for the same period remained flat at 8.2% of base salary.
A similar picture was painted in Foote Partner’s skills pay survey for Q3 06, which saw average skills pay for non-certified skills increase to 7.48% of base pay, compared to a 0.10% decline of average skills pay for certified skills to 8.16% of base pay.
Every quarter, Foote Partners surveys IT pros – 60,000 individuals for the most recent report – to measure the premiums employers are paying for IT skills. The survey found that in Q4 06, 52% of respondents receive some form of tech skills pay as part of their overall compensation – the highest since Foote Partners’ records began.
“Pay for IT certifications may have been flat for the year, but the important finding is that for the last six months of 2006, the certifications tracked posted an overall decline of nearly 2%. This is obviously a disturbing trend for both independent training companies that focus on certification test preparation and the many vendors who rely on certifications to help maintain a foothold in IT departments for their products,” said David Foote, CEO and chief research officer at Foote Partners, in a statement.
But he added that “it would be foolish to imply that gold standard certifications like the Project Management Professional, Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert, and Certified Systems Security Professional and others are not highly valued by employers who continue to reward certificants with annual pay premiums worth 10% to 6% of base pay.”
However, average certification pay grew only 3.2% over the past two years, compared to a 13.3% gain in non-certified IT skills in the period, the report adds. The only certified IT skills category – out of numerous categories that include IT security, project management and networking and internetworking skills – to see a growth in skills pay was Web development-related certifications.
Foote says employers want workers who understand the industry they’re in and have experience in specific systems and software. “And they want workers who can operate under tough deadlines and withstand a certain amount of organizational discomfort,” says Foote. “If you’re that kind of person and you have demonstrated technical skills, not being certified will probably not matter if you have other important strengths – business, customer, interpersonal – in the right proportions for the job.”
Here are some hard numbers from the report (a link to a summary of the report is embedded in this story “SAP workers in high demand”):
*Average premium pay for certified networking skills declined 3.7% to 8.8% of base pay in Q4 06.
*Average premium pay for certified system admin/engineer/network OS declined 1.9% to 7.8% of base pay in Q4 06.
*Average premium pay for non-certified networking and communications skills increased 2.5% to 7.3% of base pay in Q4 06.
*Average premium pay for messaging, e-mail, and GroupWare increased 7.3% to 6.2% of base salary in Q4 06.
As always, I’d let you get your thoughts on this. What steps are you taking to increase your knowledge of your particular vertical industry? Do you believe that employers are looking for business, customers and interpersonal skills more so than certifications? I’ve received mail from some readers who believe vendor certifications are nothing more than ways for manufacturers to promote vendor lock-in and are expensive for IT pros to maintain. Others call for a vendor neutral certification (presumably like CompTIA’s Network+ but for the expert level). Let me know your thoughts.
