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[Bill Gates]

SA IT workers score big in salary stakes


By Lesley Stones, Business Day, 26 April 2007
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SALARIES in the IT industry have risen an average of 25% in the past year
alone, but 33% of employees are still underpaid.

They also know they are in high demand, and a massive 52% have actively
applied for other jobs in the past 12 months, according to the latest salary
survey by the online publisher ITWeb. 

The hi-tech brain drain is continuing, with 5% of the respondents having
accepted a job overseas in the past few months. 

A global shortage of technology skills is fuelling the job-hopping, as local
companies compete to recruit from a scarce pool of talent and as foreign
companies seek to plug their own gaps with South Africans. 

The survey found that, overall, male IT staff enjoyed a pay rise of 29% to
earn an average of R28340 a month, while women earned an average of R23913,
up 21% from last year. The industry is still heavily skewed towards pale
males, with 82% of the 3400 respondents being male and 65% being white. 

That probably reflects the demographics of the industry quite accurately,
although ITWeb's editorial director, Ranka Jovanovic, said the figures could
be slightly exaggerated as ITWeb's readers were largely white and male. 

The salaries being paid vary enormously from company to company. Lowest of
the low are help desk staff, earning an average of just R9500 a month. The
salary a new hire lands depends largely on their negotiation and interview
skills and so the easiest way to earn an increase may be to brush up on your
negotiation skills and change jobs.

Among the highest earners were an IT project manager on an annual package of
R1,3m and a systems engineer pulling in R960000 a year. Contract workers can
fare even better, with a disaster recovery specialist and a software
architect both claiming to earn R1,4m. 

Despite those big-buck boasts, Jovanovic said, a high salary was not the key
factor determining whether an IT worker was happy in their job. The
challenge of the job and the atmosphere at work were cited as more important
factors in determining their overall satisfaction, with pay ranking as the
third most important element. 

But for those who were unhappy at work, 33% felt undervalued, while 29% said
they would switch jobs because they were stagnating and saw no career
opportunities with their company. 

Bryan Hattingh, MD of the leadership consultancy Cycan, said the global
shortage of IT skills was bad enough to be materially damaging some
companies. The shortage had been caused by the negligence of companies in
not training people up when the technology sector was in the doldrums. 

Now that technology had become essential to practically every business and
needed people to run it, companies were literally paying the price for their
past negligence by having to pay ever-increasing wages.