Pay Inched Up For Tech Pros Last Quarter, Says ReportPay Inched Up For Tech Pros Last Quarter, Says Report

Pay for tech professionals, especially those with certain skills, continued to rise in the third quarter compared to the same time last year, according to a new wage report released by IT staffing and outsourcing firm Yoh.

From July to September, hourly wages for IT pros grew an average of 2.5% compared to the third quarter of 2005, according to Yoh's analysis of wages for 5,000 technology pros hired by more than 1,000 employers nationwide.

"There's been solid, steady growth," says Jim Lanzalotto, Yoh's VP of strategy and marketing. While the average increase "isn't spectacular, it's not out of control either, which wouldn't be good because markets get out of whack," he says.

Yoh has seen the same type of solid growth this year that it tracked for wages in 2004 and 2005, when pay began to climb "out of the trough" in 2002 and 2003, Lanzalotto says.

Several categories of in-demand talent saw wages rise 5% or more during the third quarter. "Today's rock stars include ERP, especially SAP and Oracle guys," Lanzalotto says. "You can't find enough of them."

Indeed, those skills are commanding the biggest hourly wages right now. For instance, the average hourly wage for a technical ERP consultant was $83.36, while SAP functional consultants earned $78.31 an hour. "That's over $3,000 per week for those skills. That's a great gig," he says.

Also among the quarter's top earners were hardware engineers, who got an average of $65.92 per hour, and ETL developers, who were paid an average hourly wage of $65.58. Project managers earned an average hourly wage of $54.41, and those with specific experience such as managing CRM projects earned even more.

But not all techies saw their paychecks grow. Commodity skills such as help desk work, which is frequently outsourced, were among the talent groups that saw their hourly wages shrink. Lanzalotto couldn't provide a specific percentage for the pay decrease.