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By Vincent Capasso
As IT professionals we always look to sharpen our skills in order to maintain our relevance to our employers, but as we know new skills acquisition does not always lead to a pay raise. So why not focus on those skills that are valued by most employers and will increase your chance for continual pay raises and perhaps even a bonus.
As always the exact amount of demand for your IT skills will depend on your particular area of specialization. We all know that demand for some skill sets come and go from favor on almost an annual basis. This is a trend in the IT industry that professional IT workers have had to deal with in the last decade. It started with Y2K and really kicked into high gear with the growth of the outsourcing industry and the events of September 11, 2001.
Here is some IT career guidance that can assist you in making the right choices as you become a mature IT professional.
According to research firm Foote Partners' IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index, updated for the first quarter of 2011, pay premiums for certain certifications have hit their lowest point in years even as certain non-certified skills have seen a significant uptick in pay. "Our survey is showing the lowest average pay for an IT certification since our firm began formally surveying and publishing skills pay benchmarks back in 1999," David Foote, Foote Partners' co-founder and CEO, wrote in an introduction to the report.
Perhaps the most positive news stems from the fact that certain IT skills are now more in demand and there is growing compensation associated with them for the first time in a long while. "But we're also at the highest average premium pay for a non-certified skill since September 2001, so this is the largest gap in pay for skills and certifications in 10 years." During the quarter, average premium pay for 252 noncertified skills increased 1.4 percent in value.
Meanwhile, pay for 231 individual IT certifications declined some 1.9 percent. "The fact is that employers still think highly enough of the 231 certifications we do survey to be willing to pay a cash premium to workers who have earned them," Foote wrote. At the same time, though, "what I think we're seeing is that there are hundreds of skills that may not have certifications that are being valued more highly by employers."
Some of the IT skills that are seeing the largest compensation and demand increase include:
1. Project Management and CRM Skills.
2. Network Security Management, SANs Management (storage area networking) and Novell Netware ( if you can believe it).
3. IT Communications skills including Unified Communications and Messaging.
4. Web and E-Commerce Skillsets specifically inluding knowledge of IBM's WebSphere and Microsoft's .NET platforms.
5. In the applications development area knowledge of Tcl, SAS, PL/SQL ( Oracle) and WebSphere MQ (MQSeries) are valuble skills.
6. In the Systems Administration area include HP-UX (Hewlett-Packard's Unix variant), Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
These skills are perennial winners as basic Systems, Database, and Network Administration is at the core of every enterprise level application that is developed, deployed and maintained throughout corporate America. Since many CIOs are still risk averse to the cloud computing model those IT specialists with these skill sets should feel secure for the next decade or more.
Next we will focus on areas in the IT industry where there is a shortage of qualified IT workers. Believe it or not they do exist. As an example just see the thread in our CIO Conversations forum named "The IBM Mainframe Brain Drain." It focuses on the shortage of IBM IT specialists in the coming decade due to the baby boomers reaching retirement age,
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