InformationWeek

Help-desk specialists earned the least of all in the IT support category, with a median base annual salary of $38,000 and median total cash compensation of $40,000.

Technical-support workers also received fewer calls from recruiters, and that may be due in part to lower salaries (recruiters often charge companies a commission based on a negotiated salary). For example, while almost 75% of survey respondents who work in IT security say they had been solicited by recruiters in the past year, only 44% of help-desk staffers had received such contact.

Does that mean those seeking IT careers should avoid working the help desk? Not necessarily, says Paul Daversa, president of recruitment firm Resource Systems Group. "If you're coming out of school with no computer science major, it's a fine way to break in at the very beginning. And at the very top, pay is good--for example, VP of the service center."

There appears to be good demand for technical-support workers, according to a study completed earlier this month by the Information Technology Association of America. The group's survey of 700 IT hiring managers indicates that one-third of new jobs will be in tech support.

ITAA president Harris Miller says some of those respondents were from small companies with minimal IT implementations. While IT infrastructure at small companies in the past may have consisted of a handful of PCs, more small businesses are looking to employ people with some technical skills in order to implement basic E-business and E-commerce functions.

Companies that assume they can dole out comparably lower salaries to technical-support workers might be making a mistake. "You end up with incompetence," Harris says. In fact, he says, salaries will rise for tech-support workers over time, as companies realize they have an undervalued skill set. "As companies make more sophisticated decisions about recruitment, salaries in this area will go up," he says.

Daversa says more companies will outsource help-desk functions because of the difficulty of recruiting and retaining quality employees to work in technical support.