Salaries, Perks Down In 2004 IT Job MarketSalaries, Perks Down In 2004 IT Job Market

Base salaries for IT professionals--especially for those starting new jobs--are likely to fall an average of 1.6% in 2004, according to new analysis of thousands of job orders received by Robert Half Technology, a provider of IT staffing and consulting services.

Melissa Maffettone, a Robert Half Technology regional branch manager in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., says the slight overall drop reflects "normalization in the market." She explains that salaries for some positions, such as IT support and help desk, are indeed falling because supply of talent is exceeding demand, while demand and pay for other positions, particularly in security and systems auditing, are increasing.

"Over the last five years, there was an influx of people entering the IT profession, and [because]many of them are in entry-level types of jobs, like IT support and help desk, that availability of talent has pushed down starting salaries for those jobs," she says.

For instance, base compensation for desktop-support analysts in 2004 will drop 5.3%, with starting salaries in the range of $47,000 to $65,000, according to the analysis.

However, pay for one of the most-sought-after skills, data security analysis, will rise 2.1%, ranging from $67,000 to $90,750 annually.

The analysis also indicates that base salaries of CIOs will fall an average of 2.6% to the range of $115,500 to $196,250.

Beverly Lieberman, president of Halbrecht & Lieberman Associates, an IT executive search firm, says she hasn't seen a decline in the base salaries of new CIO positions; however, other perks are less generous than in the past.

"There's been belt tightening in bonuses. Companies are much less willing to offer sign-ons or to guarantee first-year bonuses than they did before," she says. Also, CIO pay raises "tend to be flat, or more in the 5% to 10% range these days, rather than in the 15% to 20% range you'd see in the past."