Hourly wages for IT pros have hit the highest levels since 2001, according to a new study by Yoh, an IT staffing firm.

The average hourly wage for IT workers was $31.30 in the first quarter of 2007, the highest since January 2001, when Yoh began its quarterly survey.

"There's been a big jump" in wages for IT workers since the first quarter of 2006, says Jim Lanzalotto, Yoh vice president of strategy and marketing. According to the Yoh Index of Technology Wages, the average hourly IT wage rose 5.5% from the first quarter of 2006 to the first quarter of 2007.

"There's unprecedented customer demand and not enough people" especially for IT pros with skills and experience in ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) deployments, including ones sold by German-based SAP, as well as many tech engineering positions, he says.

Among the most-in-demand jobs -- with the hottest pay -- in the first quarter were technical consultants, who earned an average of $83.72 per hour; SAP functional consultants, who earned $76.67 an hour; hardware engineers, who earned $75.68 an hour; and ETL developers, who generally work on data warehousing projects and earned $66.52 an hour.

Also among the highest paid, and hotly sought-after tech talent were .Net developers, who earned $53.40 an hour; Java developers, who earned $57.27 an hour; project managers, who earned $60.73 an hour; and database administrators, who earned $59.80 an hour.

"The overall technology space continues to drive the economy," says Lanzalotto.