According to a the latest IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index, compiled by Foote Partners, pay for in-demand IT skills, including IBM MQ Skills, rose the fastest it has in 14 years.
CIOs seeking to hire or retain skilled IT workers should continue to budget generously for payroll. Pay premiums for non-certified tech skills rose by the largest amount in 14 years in the first quarter of 2022, according to the latest edition of the IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index, compiled by Foote Partners.
The quarterly index also covers pay premiums for IT certifications, which — in a bit of good news for cash-strapped CIOs — have resumed a long decline begun more than three years ago with their largest quarterly drop since late 2020.
Still, the analyst firm stands by its mid-2020 pandemic prediction that “employers won’t be feeling a true sense of normalcy or find comfort in predicting their future until the fourth quarter, despite recent relieve in various restrictions.”
The average premium paid for non-certified skills rose by 1.6% in the quarter, lifting the pay premium for one skill from around 9.35% to around 9.5% of base salary. To put things in perspective, that would mean an increase of around $150 on a salary of $100,000 versus the previous quarter, bringing the average premium back to where it was two years ago.
The pay premium value of IT certifications, however, declined by 1.2% over the quarter (and 11% over the past three years), to around 6.5% of base salary.
Money-making methodology
The size of the premiums paid varied widely by skill, Foote’s analysts found.
In the first quarter of 2022, skills centered around “management, methodology, and process” were the most richly-rewarded, buoyed by demand for skills such as AIops, Azure Key Vault, big data analytics, complex event processing/event correlation, deep learning, DevSecOps, Google TensorFlow, MLOps, prescriptive analytics, PyTorch, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), security architecture and models, and site reliability engineering (SRE), almost all of which continued to grow in value. (Among them, only […]
