Proactive pay raises

The tight IT labor market is one of the reasons why Saladinos Inc., a food service distributor in Fresno, Calif., handed out 6% to 7% salary increases to its IT staff this year, says CIO Craig Urrizola.

After having outsourced network and application support over the past few years, the company now employs seven IT staffers who primarily focus on optimizing and re-engineering Saladinos' business operations, says Urrizola.

"We're trying to keep them from looking outside," he says. It helps that the business process work "keeps them engaged and motivated," he adds.

Didi Raizen, an IT applications manager at Flatiron Construction Corp. in Longwood, Colo., says she's happy with the 8% raise she received this year after having received 3% to 4% raises for the past few years. But she had to "fight" for her increase, partly by rallying end users to lobby on her behalf.

Below-median pay is de rigueur in the nonprofit sector, says Don Gillett, director of information management at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center in Research Triangle Park. As such, IT salaries for his staff "are probably where they should be," says Gillett, who says he relies on staffing services firm Robert Half Technology, Computerworld and other sources to gauge labor rates.

"Our staff likes to be associated with an organization that does good things," says Gillett. "If they didn't feel their salary was satisfying them, I don't think they'd stay very long."

Indeed, a higher percentage of IT professionals, such as Jeff Blackmon, reported being satisfied with their compensation this year (57%) than in 2006 (54%).

Blackmon, a business continuity consultant at L-3 Communications Holdings, took matters into his own hands five years ago by returning to school. He has obtained his CISSP information security certification and a master's degree in information systems management from the Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry University.

"I was getting caught in that 3% to 4% [annual raise], and I could see that it wasn't good," says Blackmon. "So I decided to manage my own career."

Now, he says, "my salary for what I do is very good, right up there with U.S. averages."

Still, salary satisfaction is a relative term for others, such as Karen Piper. When Piper was laid off in May 2006 after eight years at Sun Microsystems, she took an 18% pay cut to become a business intelligence analyst at Ball Corp. in Broomfield, Colo., the following month.

"For now, I'll wait and see what the next pay increase is and what projects I work on and where it goes from there," says Piper, who expects to earn a master of science degree from Regis University by the end of 2008.

For his part, Gillett doesn't think the industry needs to fear another salary retreat like the one the market experienced in 2002. "Some people entered IT [in the late 1990s] thinking they could walk in the door and make US$50,000 -- and they could," he says. But now, he notes, the people who continue to work in IT are generally those who have a professional interest, not those "who just want to make a big salary."

In Depth: IT Salaries on the Rise