Salary Survey
In a survey of 29,400 workers in over 1,850 private and public sector employers, security certifications were found to be growing the most rapidly (out of 135 skills and certifications) in improving the pay of those who hold the certifications. The quarterly Foote Survey, largest in the IT industry found extra pay for security certifications grew to 8.3% of base pay up from only 6.8% in the same quarter last year. The Foote Survey which covers nearly all popular certification programs and IT skills area is widely used by human resource departments to set salaries. Visit http://www.footepartners.com.

Security in Numbers
Pay raises for security professionals continue to outstrip other IT job categories, especially for practitioners with specialized skills and/or professional certifications. Given the gloomy IT job climate-highly publicized layoffs, canceled projects and suddenly worthless stock options, for starters-you'd think high wages would be another casualty of the slowing economy. You'd think a flood of displaced IT workers would put a damper on the kind of salary escalation that has epitomized the "employees' market" of recent years even for information security professionals. You'd be wrong.

Pay for security practitioners actually are outperforming the overall market for IT professionals, and by substantial amounts. Moreover, security-related skills are earning some of the highest bonus premiums. That's what, Foote Partners, an IT compensation and workforce management research firm, discovered in its most recent quarterly IT Professional Salary Survey and Hot Technical Skills and Certifications Pay Index (HTSCPI). Compiled from questionnaires and direct interviews with nearly 24,000 IT professionals in 55 U.S. and Canadian cities from Jan. 1 to March 31, 2001, the surveys show that overall base salaries for some 100 IT job categories grew by an average of 9.6 percent over Q1 2000.

By comparison, salaries for security-related positions increased an average of 12.2 percent, while median bonus pay for security certifications increased 11.4 percent since the third quarter of last year. Broken down, the survey results paint a far rosier picture for security professionals than any of their IT brethren.

Salaries and Bonuses
The Foote Partners' surveys incorporate responses from 1,292 security executives, managers, analysts and systems administrators from state and federal government and 26 private sector industries. The results reveal that security professionals in four out of six surveyed positions earn in excess of $100,000 in annual total salary.