Highly skilled IT workers are commanding ever-higher wages as the IT employment scene shifts to a more narrowly focused marketplace.

The Yoh Index of Technology Wages reported Monday that IT wages increased 3.1 percent overall in the fourth quarter of 2005 over the like quarter in the previous year.

"We're becoming a more and more narrowly-focused job economy," said Jim Lanzalotto, Yoh's Vice president of strategy and marketing, in an interview. "Employers are now saying, 'I need a specialist. I need a good CRM project manager with Siebel experience with 5 to 7 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry."

In the past, Lanazlotto noted, employers tended to issue requests for job candidates who tended to be generalists. "In the late 1990s, for instance, web masters were the rock stars of the time, but they were in an artificial bubble and their salaries dropped," he said.

He noted that specialists with experience in some high impact IT fields--he mentioned Oracle DB administrator and SAP functional consultants as examples – will be recession-resistant and able to command good salaries even in economic downturns.

"For instance, companies that have made significant investments in ERP, will have to continue hiring" even if there is an economic downturn, Lanzalotto said. "Between the growing need for information security experts, highly-knowledgeable ERP and Internet-based technology professionals, our outlook for the technology emloyment market and its wages is optimistic for 2006."

The top job category compiled by Yoh is for the SAP functional consultant position, which pays $75.09 per hour. Other categories were: data warehouse architect, $69.03; CRM project manager, $62.01; hardware/firmware engineer, $59.34; project manager, $57.07; Oracle database administrator; .Net developer, $45.77; data manager, $45.06; senior scientist, $43.76; and clinical research associate, $38.52.

The Yoh Index is based on a quarterly analysis of downloaded data on actual wages of about 5,000 temporary technology labor pool hires at more than 1,000 businesses.