IT Salaries Flat in 2010

IT pros saw another straight year of relatively flat salaries in 2010, according to career site Dice.

Based on the company’s 2011-2010 Annual Salary Survey, IT professionals on average received raises of just under 1 percent last year, about the same as for the prior year. That put the average salary at $79,384 compared with $78,845 in 2009.

Wages for those just at the beginning of their IT careers also didn’t fare too well, with average salaries for people with less than two years experience dropping for the second straight year, putting them 6 percent below their peak in 2008, according to Dice.

Still, the survey did uncover a few potentially promising signs from the IT pros questioned. Just about half (49 percent) of the folks polled received a raise last year compared with 36 percent in 2009. Slightly more IT pros also enjoyed bonuses—29 percent last year compared with 24 percent in 2009.

Workers themselves were slightly more satisfied with their wages as well. Among those surveyed, 50 percent were “somewhat” or “very satisfied” with their pay, up a bit from 46 percent the prior year. But IT pros are still eyeing greener pastures as four out of ten of those questioned believe they could make more money if they jumped to a different employer this year.

For those professionals looking to increase their salaries, Dice offered two possible directions: either look for work with a larger company or increase your areas of expertise. Staffers at companies with more than 5,000 employees on average earned $88,075, while those at businesses with 50 or fewer employees on average earned $69,658.

Looking at the most lucrative areas in IT, Dice found that the people receiving annual salaries of $100,000 or more had experience in such specializations as Advanced Business Application Programming, Informatica, Extract Transform and Load, and Service Oriented Architecture. But beyond these concentrated fields, Dice discovered a demand for those who work with Oracle (News - Alert) databases, J2EE/Java, C, C++, C#.

Overall, requests for Oracle experience appear in a quarter of all the job postings on Dice. The average national salary is $90,914 for Oracle DBA professionals and $88,063 for Oracle Application Server pros. Those skilled in J2EE/Java on average earn $91,060, while programmers who know any of the C languages earn between $85,500 and $90,350 on average.

Dice’s survey shows that the job and salary market continues to be tight. But as always, increasing your skills and knowledge in technology is often the best path to pursue. Those of you who work for companies that offer a training budget or tuition reimbursement should strive to take advantage of those benefits to make sure you stay marketable. Unlike the economy and business environment, keeping yourself trained and educated is one area that you can control.

Dice’s salary survey received online responses from 19,798 employed IT professionals from the Dice community between Aug. 31 and Nov. 15, 2010.

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