Survey Finds Expanding Employment Opportunities in IT

The survey shows that the financial sector plans to increase IT headcount the most (63%), with 22% of those companies expecting a headcount increase of 10% or more, according to a news release. Sixty two percent of the public/non-profit sector project IT headcount increases.

The improved job market for IT personnel could mean more IT staff turnover as IT professionals look for better opportunities. Lily Mok, senior consultant with Gartner EXP says companies are looking to total compensation packages to help retain valuable employees, a trend found among many employers in a recent Mercer survey (See Employers Focus on Total Compensation Packages ).

The survey shows that the average budgeted base salary increase for IT employees in the 2005 fiscal year is 3.5%, 0.3% higher than in the 2004 fiscal year. Companies also appear to have increased the variable pay portion of their reward package, according to Gartner.

The study also revealed that:

• The most difficult-to-hire positions for IT organizations include project manager, web applications programmer, security analyst, database administrator and network engineer. Gartner said that the increased search for project managers, for instance, suggests that companies are starting to focus on more effectively managing and prioritizing projects that can deliver a competitive advantage for the business.
• The skills that IT organizations report having the greatest difficulty recruiting are PeopleSoft, J2EE Microsoft.Net, Java, Oracle, Visual C#.Net, SAP, XML and XML Web Services.

The IT Market Compensation study is conducted annually by Gartner EXP. More information is available at http://www.gartner.com/hcm/hcm_compensation.jsp