Pay targeted specifically to noncertified and certified information technology-related skills has exploded in popularity according to a new survey of 54,000 IT professionals in the US and Canada, 51 per cent of whom are now receiving such pay in their compensation packages.

A common practice for years has been to recognize or reward tech skills using cash bonuses, with market values typically reviewed every 12-15 months and skill pay rates adjusted as necessary.

"Many bonus programs vanished during the economic recession," notes Foote. "And although they've returned in force, what we've discovered is that the dominant practice today is to incorporate additional pay for IT certifications and noncertified skills into workers' base salaries. This has dramatically increased the incidence of skills pay, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think."

The study found that that employers prefer the salary-based tech skills pay option because it also solves a much thornier problem: IT job titles that are not well-matched with actual on-the-job responsibilities. This has been a serious, long standing problem well-known within the ranks of IT and HR professionals, according to Foote.

"Salary surveys are traditionally tied to job titles. What has happened is that serious worker morale and retention issues have exploded in thousands of companies where surveyed salaries, matched to workers' job titles, are clearly out of whack with the work the employee is actually doing. But it's an absolute nightmare to go through the process of reclassifying and re-titling IT workers, and few employers want to tackle what is not only a complicated procedure but often a politically sensitive one."

A more practical solution has been to declare specific tech skills as dominant or unique to a job. The job is then priced in the usual fashion, with additional pay incorporated into the mix for the skills earlier identified as key to performing the job the title remains unchanged.

"The threat posed by recruiters cannot be overestimated today," warns Foote. "This solution offers a lot of advantages, but one of the biggest is reducing the leverage recruiters enjoy with an employer that haplessly underpays its IT workers within the boundaries of an otherwise well-functioning compensation system that has been in place for years. The problem is what we all know to be true: IT workers are different."

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