According to a report from consultants Pricewaterhouse Coopers, salary increases in the IT and communications fields will be the smallest among all groups in 2005. If it’s money you’re after, you should be in the money business. Workers in financial services are going to see the biggest gains, with average base salary rates expected to grow by 5.4 per cent, as against the relatively paltry 3.7 per cent increases that the techies can expect.
If there is any good news at all for IT professionals, it is that at least the rate of increase is going to be greater than last year, when on average their base salaries increased by 3.2 per cent. Gone are the days, it would seem, when a certified Cisco engineer could name his or her own price to a prospective employer!
For senior IT management, there is good news and bad news in all this. The good news of course is that staffing costs will be kept in check to some degree. One can plan to spend a little more on equipment and software without having to factor in a large premium to ensure retention of the necessary skills to develop and maintain the new systems.
But in the medium to long term this could be interpreted as a warning sign. With pecuniary prospects in the technology sector diminishing, the numbers of students studying technology related subjects is also likely to decline. That won’t be a problem today or tomorrow, but it will be in a few years time.
There is of course a body of opinion that says that there will always be a plentiful supply of engineers because the subject matter alone attracts talented people towards it. I have sat in discussions with company directors (not here I hasten to add) who maintain that engineers are born, not made. They are not interested in money; conquest of technological problems is their primary motivation. Typically there then ensues some gobbledygook about Mazlow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’—which denotes the relative importance people place on such factors as survival, hygiene, self respect and self-realisation—to develop the argument that engineers are happy with a subsistence wage just as long as they get to play with the latest coolest toys. Money is just a ‘hygiene factor’, goes the argument.
Yeah right!
It’s true that in the case of many techies, the quest for great wealth plays second fiddle to a love of their specialist subject but think for a second where lies the power in the relationship between a competent technician/developer/sys admin and the management of a company dependent on the technology they tend.
The more mission critical your databases, application servers, web and e-mail servers etc become, the more vital are the personnel on whose expertise continued operation relies. Failure to take into account reasonable remunerative aspirations could end up causing all sorts of problems.
But there is a more fundamental problem than that. As technology becomes more and more embedded in the fabric of business it is inevitably the case that business or ‘soft’ skills will become more prevalent in the management of technology. It’s not that the hard-core technical skills will go away; on the contrary, they will remain a given but the positions occupied by technology managers will have to compete for the appropriate skill sets with more attractive management roles in other sectors.
Technology in business now is less of a pioneering experience and more of a critical management role. Just look at the compliance pressures coming down the pipe for those who have to satisfy Sarbanes-Oxley audits. Technology management roles will increasingly have to be filled by those who not only know an IP address from a telephone number but are trained in all the normal panoply of management skills—financing, project management, accounting, forecasting etc.
To attract such people requires three things: money, money and money. If you doubt that, see how the Financial Times chooses to rank the best business schools in the world taking as a measure the quality of their MBA courses. (http://rankings.ft.com/rankings/mba/rankings.html). The ranking is determined simply by how rapidly graduates increased their earnings having completed a course.
This is the calibre of people that the IT installations of today and tomorrow are going to have to recruit. You can, if you wish, continue to regard remuneration for technologists as nothing more than a ‘hygiene factor’, but in the long term it won’t wash.
28/02/05
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