Certification Magazine - December 2007 - (Page 22) FIGURE 2: AVERAGE HOURS WORKED PER WEEK According to the Salary Survey, 43.5 percent of you plan to change jobs in the coming year, and 56.5 plan to stay. Nearly 63 percent of you work for companies with fewer than 5,000 employees, about 17 percent work for companies with 5,000 to 29,999 employees, about 12 percent work for companies with 30,000 to 99,999 employees and about 8 percent of you work for organizations with 100,000 or more employees. 8 – Mike Prokopeak, mikep@certmag.com 15.9% Over 50 59.2% 41 to 50 1.7% Under 20 2.3% 20 to 30 20.9% 31 to 40 What Issues are Important to IT Professionals? This is a change from last year, when the largest group of respondents held only one certification. The percentage of you who hold more than three certifications rose to about 34 percent this year from 30 percent in 2006, and the number of you holding six or more certifications rose from 13.5 percent in 2006 to about 16 percent in 2007. The number of you who added one new certification to your portfolio in the past year, 36.5 percent, just barely beat out the number of you that added no certifications in the past year, 36.4 percent (it came down to a difference of 42 responses among more than 35,000 survey respondents). But among those who added new certs, there was an uptick in the number of people who added more than two, from about 23 percent in 2006 to about 27 percent in 2007. The majority of you work full time, at about 93 percent. Only 3 percent of you work part time, and 2.5 percent were currently unemployed. The majority of you, about 59 percent, work on average 41 to 50 hours per week. Most of you have been in the industry for fewer than 10 years, with just 3.5 percent for less than one year. About 31 percent of you have been in the field for one to five years and 35 percent for six to 10 years. The remainder, a little more than 30 percent, have been in IT for 11 or more years. The majority of you have been with your current employer for fewer than five years, with about 17 percent of you having been there for one year, about 19 percent for two years and about 12 percent for three years. About 24 percent of you have held your current job with your employer for less than a year. The state of the workplace today can be perilous. One minute, you have a job, you’re happily building your 401(k) investment portfolio and thanking the stars the cost of living isn’t escalating more quickly. The next thing you know, a bunch of people in your department become victims of economic downsizing or company restructuring. Even worse, you’re fired for reasons better left unnamed. So, it makes sense that the CertMag 2007 Salary Survey results show that the state of the IT job market, job security, as well as compensation and benefits are issues that pose serious concern for IT pros. Survey results were fairly evenly split among those three topics, with a roughly 32 percent response rate. Once a dominating topic of conversation on the IT landscape, outsourcing has died down as a top concern, which might indicate a slowdown in the number of organizations outsourcing some or all of their IT functions. About 23 percent of respondents report they benefited greatly from the process and actually work for an outsourcing company. More than 62 percent of respondents said outsourcing has not affected them personally, but the Salary Survey gathered quite a few comments from those who have gone through the process. “As a senior consultant, I have been retained by my company and even given a substantial raise as we have gone through our offshoring phase,” one respondent said. “But my team has been hit hard, losing quite a large percentage of staff, mostly due to voluntary separation and early retirements rather than actual layoffs. The quality of service we were able to provide suffered accordingly, and our customers are now unhappy. Reversing the damage is proving difficult and expensive.” 22 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE December 2007
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