One third of IT professionals intend to seek new roles in 2018
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One-third of IT professionals intend to seek new roles in 2018

13 Dec 2017

A survey of more than 2,000 IT professionals in Europe and North America finds that almost two-thirds feel undercompensated.

Spiceworks conducted surveys for its 2018 IT Career Outlook last month, polling 2,163 respondents from Europe and North America.

The respondents work in companies of varying size and come from a number of different industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, non-profit, education, government and finance.

The polled group was also classified by generation, with millennials/Gen Y (1981-1997), Gen X (1965-1980) and Baby Boomers (1946-1964 ) represented.

The results indicate that while there is high job satisfaction (70pc of respondents across all generations), 63pc of IT workers feel undercompensated.

Millennials were more likely to indicate that they were dissatisfied with their salaries, at 68pc, which can partly be attributed to the fact that they are more likely to be working in entry-level positions.

Gen X and Baby Boomers achieved close to parity on rates of pay-related complaints, at 60pc and 61pc respectively.

The data indicates that almost one-third (32pc) of IT professionals intend to seek a new role, or accept a new role they have already been offered, in 2018. While a large chunk of the industry, it is a marked decline from the Spiceworks 2017 IT Career Outlook, which saw 45pc of respondents indicate the desire for a change of role.

The largest motivator for those seeking new employment was to get a lucrative compensation package, with 75pc citing this as their primary reason for looking further afield. This was followed by a desire to improve their knowledge, with 70pc expressing that they want a new position to advance their skills.

What does 2018 hold?

The job outlook for 2018 among IT professionals was pretty optimistic, with 36pc saying that they believe the market will improve.

This aligns with a State of IT report recently released by Spiceworks, which shows that 45pc of organisations intend to increase their IT departments.

The survey also asked professionals which skills they believe to be “critical to have” in 2018, and found that workers overwhelmingly (81pc) agree that cybersecurity skills are essential.

This is unsurprising given how 2017 was rife with ransomware outbreaks and data breaches. Other prioritised skills included networking, infrastructure hardware, end-user devices and storage/backup.

You can view the research in full here.

Eva Short
By Eva Short

Eva Short was a journalist at Silicon Republic, specialising in the areas of tech, data privacy, business, cybersecurity, AI, automation and future of work, among others.

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