Web Security Gets Top IT Pay These Days

David Butler says he has the ideal job. Why is the 44-year- old director of human resources and payroll applications at spice maker McCormick & Co. so upbeat? "IT offers a way to get HR out of the back office and help people make the business go," Butler explains. "That's why I wanted to lead this group." More IT staffers and managers say they're satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs this year than last, according to the just-released 2005 InformationWeek Salary Survey. While the majority of the 12,158 IT professionals surveyed say they're content now, would they do it all again? It doesn't seem likely: About two-thirds of the respondents don't see IT as a promising career. A combination of factors, including stagnant pay, the belief that outsourced work costs Americans jobs, and the recent history of economic and employment gloom, continue to haunt IT pros' attitudes. "We all have vivid memories of having gone through rough times over the last four years, and it's hard to have a level of trust in ourselves, in our companies, and the economy as whole," says Nate Viall, president of IT recruitment firm Nate Viall & Associates. Those impressions may overshadow what's actually a brighter picture for the profession. IT remains one of the most lucrative careers for Americans, with an unemployment rate nearly two percentage points below the average for all occupations. That's an improvement over this time last year, when IT unemployment basically mirrored that of the overall job market. Median salaries for IT staffers are more than double those of the average U.S. worker, and tech managers earn about two-thirds more than supervisors and executives in other fields. Since 1999, median annual IT staff compensation--salaries plus bonuses--has risen 5.8% a year to $71,000; manager compensation has increased 5.5% annually to $95,000. Among those on the edge of the six-figure mark when it comes to salary--all at $98,000--are managers in application development, human resources, IS, and Web security. (See stories, "Security's Shifting Dynamic," "Vertical-Industry Approach," and "Skills Combo Pays Off" for the career strategies of IT pros in some of the highest-paying professions.) Butler landed his sweet-spot job after spending his entire career at McCormick, beginning as a programmer trainee nearly 20 years ago and working his way up to management. He sees technology as an instrument to help retain qualified employees as retirements loom, as well as prepare the company for the future by recruiting new skilled talent. Butler, who earned an MBA from York College of Pennsylvania, wants a central role in developing systems that help in succession planning and personnel development. He's on the right track. The survey shows that IT professionals expect their companies to help them grow in their careers. Two-fifths of the respondents anticipate further education and training, and nearly 20% expect reimbursement for certification. Application development, project management, general IT functions, and network and systems infrastructure are at the top of the list of training options that companies offer, and these have some correlations to the top-paying management and staff job titles. Median salaries for wireless infrastructure and enterprise-application-integration staff specialists, for instance, hover around $80,000. But it's not a total match. For instance, while Web security is a high-paying career path for managers and staffers, only 19% of companies offer training in security analysis. That seems pretty low considering exposures to security risks are on the rise. In fact, vulnerabilities in Web apps soared more than 80% last year, according to a Symantec Corp. study. Christofer Hoff, the chief information security officer at Western Corporate Federal Credit Union, one of the nation's largest federal credit unions, says the shifting demands of security constantly test his ability to manage risk. In addition to monitoring for security breaches, the goal is to manage processes so that data isn't exposed to the wrong people. "You have to understand where the information goes. The notion that we stop at the firewall is a very shallow view," says Hoff, who ran his own IT services company from the mid-1990s to 2003, when he joined Wescorp. Hoff obviously feels challenged in his job, but one question the survey raises is whether IT professionals are trading a challenging career for job security. A vast majority of those surveyed say challenge and responsibility are top job considerations, yet only 33% of IT staff and 47% of IT managers say they feel challenged in their positions. More ordinary factors weigh heavily on the minds of many IT pros. Job stability equaled challenge for 61% of staffers, up six percentage points in a year. Similarly, 54% of managers cited job stability as a concern, up nine points from last year.

Deirdre Woods understands the fluctuations. The CIO and associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business says she has witnessed a sea change in the attitudes among business-technology workers toward their jobs. Gone are the days of the entrepreneurial spirit that drove many business technologists to become a part of fledgling dot-coms, only to find themselves unemployed at the end of the boom cycle. Today, getting a job that pays a decent salary and provides good health-insurance benefits has become a priority for many IT workers and managers, just as it is for other Americans, she says. Our survey shows that two out of five staffers and managers are somewhat or actively looking to change employers. Yet a craving for job security exists, and that tends to make people more risk-averse, which could be disastrous for companies' IT organizations. "Legacy people protect legacy systems," Bob Herbold, the author of The Fiefdom Syndrome (Random House, 2004) and former chief operating officer at Microsoft and CIO at Procter & Gamble Co., told attendees at InformationWeek's recent Spring Conference. The risk of people staying put and protecting old ways of doing business is especially high in IT-intensive roles, because business executives who themselves don't understand their organizations' technology fear moving those people. "The probability of innovating after you've been at a job three or four years is very, very low," Herbold said. One change to the status quo that manifests itself among survey respondents is outsourcing. Forty-five percent say their companies don't outsource business-technology jobs, while 30% say their organizations hire offshore contractors to perform IT duties. Overwhelmingly, the survey-takers contend that the current trend toward outsourcing harms the IT profession: 68% say the results of outsourcing are fewer IT jobs; 61%, lower employee morale; 53%, new hires receive reduced salaries; and 42%, fewer chances for advancement. Yet the trend toward outsourcing is accelerating, which brings everything back to square one--the soured attitudes many business-technologists have about their profession. A large majority of staff (69%) and managers (64%) don't believe a career path in IT and the potential for salary advancement is as promising today as it was five years ago. Responding to a recent posting on the InformationWeek blog (blog.informationweek .com), a 20-year IT veteran wrote of the many baby boomers who entered the profession for money and job security only to see their jobs outsourced offshore. "I do not encourage my children or anybody else's to get into IT anymore," he wrote. "They need basic computer competency, but the programming art is dying. All the entry jobs are going to low-paid foreign workers. It's hard to even get started anymore, much less keep your career going." University of Michigan business professor C.K. Prahalad disputes arguments that offshore outsourcing is causing the loss of business-technology jobs in the United States, telling attendees at the InformationWeek Conference that the IT explosion in countries such as India and China drives demand for American-made hardware, software, and other goods, creating additional IT jobs here. "We're creating more jobs [in the United States] than we're losing," Prahalad said. "The essence of globalization is interdependence." For many IT veterans who love their profession, the struggle to stay in the game continues. Take Mickey Corbin, a 57-year-old IT project manager from suburban Cleveland who has been performing contract work for a number of northeastern Ohio organizations. He'd like a full-time position but makes do with temporary jobs. On the plus side, some recent work has paid as much as $55 an hour, though a five-month stint he recently completed with the Cleveland Clinic, helping supervise a medical database project, paid only $20 an hour. "I've got bills to be paid," Corbin says. "I'd rather do something to keep my mind sharp than play solitaire." Illustration by Dan Page