Salary Survey 2005

Johannesburg, 21 Apr 2005

We have improved the questionnaire every year, and this time we again took into account input from respondents and industry specialists - in particular Susan Haiden, Insource Group client development manager.

Any comparisons made to previous surveys are purely for interest, and are not statistically comparable as the sample group and questionnaire are different.

We tried to streamline job titles and job functions to avoid confusion arising from the fact that job titles vary from company to company. While a lot remains to be done in this regard, we hope we have made a significant improvement.

The first, most obvious finding is that average salaries across the entire sample are uncannily similar to last year`s. Salaries are, in fact, only marginally lower, with the gap between the packages for female and male respondents marginally smaller than last year.

The ratio of white respondents to others dropped slightly this year - 70% of the respondents were white, compared with 75% last year.

The gap between entry-level and top salaries remains huge; for example, a systems engineer can earn as little as R4 000 or as much as R83 000 per month. By far the most interesting outcome was that money slipped from the top to the 11th position on the list of most important job satisfaction factors. The ability to work from home is now top priority for IT professionals.

Until the next survey, I hope this report provides a fair indication of your market value as an IT professional.

Salary Survey 2005

This is ITWeb`s seventh annual salary survey, which attracted a record number of over 4 000 respondents.