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CM Journal Articles HR Corner: Salary Survey - Are You Being Paid What You are Worth?
CM Journal Articles HR Corner: Salary Survey - Are You Being Paid What You are Worth?
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The long awaited Salary Survey is now complete and the analysis gives us valuable information about what our skills are worth and more importantly on how to move into the more lucrative areas of Software Configuration and Release Management. We reviewed 1,172 responses from software development professionals from all over the world. Over 800 responses were from Software Development professionals in the United States. Another 368 responses were from our colleagues in the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Worldwide, respondents had over 10 years of experience in IT with an average of 4 years in Software Configuration and Release Management. The average US salary was about $80,000 with these professionals having an average of 12.5 years of experience in IT, with 5 years in a CM role. 47 CM practitioners earned $120,000 or more per year. We took a look at what distinguished the high earners from the average. Read on if you would like the inside scoop (and some important tips on increasing your own earning potential)!! Scope and Purpose As a service to our readers we undertook a confidential survey asking for salary related information that included Position Title, Salary, Location, Years of experience (in IT and in CM specifically) and a brief description of the respondents responsibilities. The scope of this effort was worldwide and our responses showed that! The purpose of the survey was to allow our readers to get a sense of where their own compensation stood in terms of what other professionals were commanding. By understanding what the market was paying, we all obviously hope to earn more money. It follows that looking at the more highly compensated professionals helps us to know what we need to add to our own job responsibilities in order to earn more. This information has wide implications for professionals in terms of training needs and the desirability of seeking wider responsibilities. Methodology The Survey was conducted starting in December of 2002 via an online HTML questionnaire. Respondents were asked to select from a list of common job titles or to indicate their own. Many people did both. The implications of this result is that CM practitioners can have wide ranging titles, sometimes having nothing to do with CM at all! Many of our readers are obviously software development professionals for whom CM is only one of many responsibilities. Therefore it is immediately obvious that CM is a core skill, although not necessarily the only “job” for many of our respondents. Next respondents were asked for their annual compensation and an indication of whether the indicated amount was in US Dollars (or the equivalent), Euros or the currency of their respective country. This turned out to be a bit difficult for us to analyze non-US based respondents. The number of years of experience in IT and the number of years specifically in a CM related role was also requested. Statistical tests of significance were not conducted, however it did seem obvious that we had a wide range of responses with many professionals indicating little or no experience and many veterans with 30+ years of experience as well. Respondents were then asked to write 1 or 2 paragraphs indicating their job responsibilities. There were people who left this question blank and others who pasted their (entire) resume! This created a challenge in parsing and cleaning our data. There were some concerns that the data might be old. While we did get a lot of responses in December of 2002, we also received a lot in the last several months. Salaries throughout the IT industry have likely decreased given the world economy and world events. At this point however, it is unlikely that this affected our survey in any significant way. It would be expected that CM skills are core responsibilities which are needed even when software development projects are postponed or decreased. In the fact the ability to fix previous releases may be MORE important when new software development efforts are cancelled or postponed due to budgetary considerations. Sources of Bias Most of the data appeared to valid and consistent. However, a few people did indicate a somewhat bizarre salary of $ 999,000. (I took the liberty of not including these responses in my analysis.) There were also a number of people who indicated that their annual salary was 10,000. In at least one case this was in US dollars. In several cases this was in currency of the respondents country (e.g. India, Pakistan, United Kingdom, Israel and the United Arab Emirates). In survey research it is common for data to be “cleaned” by recoding or eliminating data that appears to be incorrect or entered in error. The sample size, data collection method and the accuracy of the data are all considered in evaluating the appropriateness of using statistical methods (e.g. tests of significance) to evaluate and understand the survey responses. Task Analysis A wealth of information was received in the form of Task data, appropriate for performing a job analysis. This data will be further analyzed and reported in the coming months. A quick content analysis did demonstrate that the job of the CM practitioner is very diverse and the core competencies may be applied in many different contexts. Competency Based Pay It is not surprising that higher paid IT professionals had a number of indicated competencies and that technical flexibility was evident in the diversity of tasks described. IT professionals need to understand competency based pay and how it can help them earn more and advance their careers. Conclusions The brief online survey collected a remarkable amount of useful data that can help CM professionals understand their position in terms of compensation. More importantly it can indicate training needs and important career decisions that will help the IT professionals advance his/her career and earning potential. Next Steps A further content analysis of the job description data will be undertaken over the coming weeks with the results and analysis being posted on the HR Corner. Secondly, we hope to replace the current survey with an interactive query that will allow our readers to query salary ranges based upon appropriate parameters (e.g. location, years of experience and range of dates). Please give us your input and let us know what information you would like to see in future online surveys. Bob Aiello is a Senior Contributing Editor for Crossroads News and an Associate Director at Bear Stearns & Co. where he is engaged in Software Process Improvement on a large scale basis. He is also on the Board of Directors for the Organizational Development Network of Greater New York (ODNofGNY) and a member of the Steering Committee of CitySPIN in New York. Mr. Aiello has a Masters in Industrial Psychology and a BS in Computer Science. You can reach Mr. Aiello by email at raiello@acm.org
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| Last Updated on Wednesday, 25 January 2006 05:34 |
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