ESP Job Blog

Let’s talk money – more specifically compensation. This past week we put the finishing touches on our 2008 IT Salary Survey for the Twin Cities metro area. The process of collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, and reality testing the data for this effort was a quite a task. Here are a few observations from what we learned during the process.  

• Compensation data collected anonymously tends to reflect lower wages than data collected where individual or company names are provided (job boards).
• The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (MN DEED) data on compensation in IT is a strong benchmark given that it is reported by employers and has a large regional sample.
• Compensation for IT jobs on the various boards (Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice) was extremely variable for like positions in the same geographic market.
• ESP’s “real” numbers for compensation for the 13 months ending 1/31/08 averaged somewhat higher than the MN DEED data. Real in this case means data based upon actual starting salaries for IT professionals we placed, and salary ranges our clients provided for positions we worked to staff.
• We noticed an increase in variable compensation for IT professionals working in traditional jobs (not contract which has built-in variability). Most of this is in the form of bonus programs based on personal and company performance.
• Classifying and categorizing IT jobs for statistical analysis has become increasingly complex as the field has expanded. Twenty years ago if you were a Programmer Analyst you were probably coding in COBOL. Today it could be any of a number of development languages, platforms, SDKs, or environments – each one tied to different value in the market and hence different pay.

We’re projecting a modest 2% growth in IT salaries for the Twin Cities metropolitan market during 2008. We’ll have to see how the current economic reality impacts that forecast.

Regards,

Ray Davey

Welcome to the inaugural post for our new Blog! I’m kicking off this effort, but others from ESP will be writing regularly. We hope to develop a robust community of readers and contributors. Our focus is implied in the Blog name - it’s about the job, work, careers, and the activity most of us spend more time on than any other in our lives.

With so much of us invested in it (the job), why not make it topical? What can we learn together? What insights can we share? Maybe this can be a place to opinionate about the state of work, technology, the economy, world politics, and other forces that impact our professional lives. Add the fact that the job we are talking about here is working in Information Technology, and we’ve just added a layer of complexity. What field is more dynamic? How fast does one need to run just to stay even in this field? For those of us who earn a living in IT change has become routine.

As for future posts, we may occasionally blog in the realm of geekdom - we are after all in the business of IT - but mostly we are about the lives of people working in IT. I look forward to the dialog that can develop here.

Regards!

Ray Davey