In 2015, CIO magazine reports, IT salaries grew by 7.7 percent, to $96,370 annually – the biggest year-over-year increase in history. Moreover, seven metro areas now boost average IT salaries of six figures.
Whether these salad days are sustainable remains open to question. Regardless, a hot IT job market has some significant implications for executives charting their enterprise’s sourcing strategy, specifically with regard to recruitment and retention. Generous raises can certainly keep employees happy, but on the flip side a competitive climate boosts confidence of finding something even better. In response, Senior Writer Sharon Florentine points out in her article, CIOs need to redouble their focus on career growth and skills development to retain internal talent.
The state of the job market should also be a factor when assessing outsourcing options. In a recent white paper, Director Mary Patry describes how enterprises are reexamining the role of insourcing in their overall sourcing strategy mix. While generally taking a more mature and selective approach to determining what functions to take back in-house, some enterprises are repeating past mistakes. For example, when deciding to repatriate, we’ve found that executives can underestimate the difficulty of recruiting and retaining top talent. They quickly discover that recruitment and retention – a challenge that was a key factor behind the decision to outsource in the first place – has not magically gotten any easier over time. Indeed, if finding and keeping talent is difficult in lean times, the task becomes even more onerous when demand for skills is peaking.
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