IT Salary Survey Yields Beguiling Results

Brian Wood Blog

Growth is flat.

IT staff churn is up.

Life is good in healthcare IT and in the services industry.

It’s less good elsewhere.

Summary article by David Weldon in FierceCIO.

Emphasis in red added by me.

Brian Wood, VP Marketing

——-

IT compensation flat-lining, says new salary survey

IT compensation will, for the most part, remain flat for the next six months. And while there will be some areas of above-average raises and some new areas of IT job hiring, the three month moving average for IT job market growth trend for IT professionals continues to trend down.

Those are among the findings of the just-released 2014 IT Salary Survey [sub. req] by Janco Associates and eJobDescription.com. The two organizations have been conducting salary surveys of the IT job market since 1989, and they publish results of their salary surveys every January and July. The study looks not only at base salaries, but also reports on total compensation for IT professionals and overall hiring trends.

“Janco’s CIO Hiring Plan Forecast is not encouraging, with CIOs becoming more cautious in their hiring as the recovery stalls and taxes increase,” the report says. “The number of new jobs (all categories including IT) created continues to be lower than the number of jobs needed for the US economy to say even with adult population growth. The Labor Department has reported the economy added 217,000 jobs in April which is only half of what is needed to account for new entrants into the job market.”

But there is some good news on the IT hiring front: While the rate of growth in the IT job market slowed a bit, there was still a gain of 10,900 jobs for IT pros in the past three months.

Some industries are particularly represented in that figure. The North American healthcare IT market is forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 7.4 percent through 2017, the report says.

Employment is on the rise in healthcare IT and spending will reach $40 billion by the end of this year,” the salary report states. “Much of that growth will come from spending on electronic health record (EHR) systems, mobile health applications and efforts to comply with new government standards.”

Boosted by spending on new healthcare software applications–necessary for the roll-out of new HER systems–the healthcare IT market has grown at a rate of approximately 24 percent annually since 2012, the report says.

Beyond the healthcare industry, based on data and interviews that Janco has conducted, the research firm predicts “there will be more churn in IT staffs as CIOs accelerate their move to more flexible staffing models … At the same time, they are looking to hire IT people with business and analytical skills, such as risk management and project management.”

But CIOs report they are having trouble hiring IT talent, either because they can’t find candidates with the right combination of skills, or because they can’t afford them.

All of this means more turnover in IT departments,” the report warns.

Finally, where the IT job market is seeing the greatest growth is in the services industry, which accounted for 95 percent of all new IT jobs created since March, notes Janco Associates CEO and chief research officer Victor Janulaitis.

“I don’t want to overemphasize CIOs’ dependency on contractors, consultants and managed services,” Januliatis said. “Indeed, they’re also making key hires in many areas. But it’s clear that demand for full-time workers outside the services sector has yet to experience the kind of momentum witnessed in service jobs.”

http://www.fiercecio.com/story/it-compensation-flat-lining-says-new-salary-survey/2014-07-16