Happy on the Job

Triangle Business Journal reports: Information technology professionals received much smaller salary increases in 2010, but that had little effect on job satisfaction, says a new study from Global Knowledge, a consulting firm in Cary, North Carolina.

According to the Global Knowledge 2010 IT Skills and Salary Report, which queried more than 19,500 IT professionals nationwide, the base pay for IT jobs nationally ticked up by just 0.6 percent, to $82,115, in 2010. That’s a massive change from 2009, when base salaries increased by 10.4 percent, from $73,900 in 2008 to $81,600 in 2009.

For workers in South Atlantic states, which includes the Carolinas, the base salary of $85,100 in 2010 exceeded the national average.

The report attributes the lower increase to the global recession, which kept salaries in check.

IT executives, architects, and department heads are the three highest paid IT positions, earning $127,073, $102,894, and $100,757, respectively. And IT consulting tends to pay more than other industries, with the average IT consultant earning $91,668.

Despite the lack of salary growth in 2010, IT professionals say they largely are happy in their current positions, with 73.8 percent of respondents saying they are either satisfied (33.1 percent of the total), very satisfied (32.4 percent), or extremely satisfied (8.3 percent) with their current jobs.

Respondents to the survey say they expect project management, cloud computing and virtualization, data security, network administration business analysis, and process improvement to be the areas of greatest growth in the coming years. They also expect predictive analytics to become more important.

Global Knowledge provides IT training in more than 20 countries.