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A Price Tag On Your Skills

In recent weeks, InformationWeek has produced loads of coverage on the benefits and pitfalls of outsourcing, career trends, and now salary trends. Despite the gloom and doom over outsourcing, particularly offshoring, there are some reasons for optimism, at least among those who are constantly advancing their skills and raising their value to their companies. In many ways, the job market is quite healthy.

Those who are enjoying upside in their careers in this climate recognize that one of the most valuable tools to avoid being outsourced, downsized, or marginalized is knowledge. This can take the form of unbiased information about your company and industry, your profession, your particular niche in your profession, and, yes, even information on the latest outsourcing trends. In that spirit, I want to draw your attention to the 2006 edition of the InformationWeek Salary Adviser and urge you to take advantage of this interactive Web tool to better understand your value to your company and, more broadly, your value in the IT marketplace.

The tool provides 22 IT job classifications, 21 regions, and two functional levels--management and staff. From the drop-down menus, select your job classification, region, and level to see how you stack up against a sample of more than 10,000 IT professionals. Not only can you check where you stand today (hopefully that's not an unknown), but more importantly you can also use the tool to run some if-then scenarios. If you move from one region or major city to another, what's the salary impact? Case in point: A Web design/development manager in New York makes a median base salary of $88,000, with a high of $121,500 and a low of $75,000. In Chicago, the comparable figures are $75,500, $89,250, and $60,375.

Those whose career goals include greater compensation can also test the impact of a move into management. A help desk/IT support manager in Atlanta makes a median salary of $67,000, while a staff-level help desk job in the same city pays $49,000. That's a pretty good argument in favor of gunning for a management job.

Use the tool to divine trends in IT job classifications as well. For instance, what functions are seeing the most salary growth? Where salaries are, conversely, growing anemically or shrinking, that could be a leading indicator of jobs ripe to be outsourced. A few examples to ponder:

• The average IT security manager in New York got no salary increase and remained at a median salary of $113,000. A somewhat surprising development, and one that should give pause to IT security managers.
  
• An enterprise resource planning manager in Boston saw a salary increase of 2.3% to a median salary of $122,500.
  
• Groupware/E-mail managers in San Francisco saw their salaries jump 7.5% to a median figure of $129,000.
  
• At the very high end of the spectrum, enterprise application integration managers in Los Angeles saw their median base salary shoot up 15% to a high of $117,000 in the past year.
  

While ERP managers are making more than EAI managers today, the salary trend favors expertise in integration. And groupware/E-mail is an excellent skill set to have. How can you position yourself to capitalize?

Such information--available from InformationWeek and many other Web sources--including our new sister site, TechCareers--gives you critical insight on how to make yourself indispensable in an increasingly globalized and brutally competitive IT market. Can you afford not to take advantage?

Please weigh in with any trends--hot locations, hot skills, hot industries--that you're experiencing firsthand.

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