Indian IT professional’s salary increase one of the highest in world !

According to recently released Dataquest 2007 salary survey, typical Indian software professional got an average salary increase of 18.7% in 2007, an improvement over 18.3% increase recorded in the previous year. This is revealed by a nation-wide survey carried out by IDC India for CyberMedia group’s flagship publication Dataquest, covering 2,806 IT professionals. This number is one of the highest in the world. Compare this to roughly 2.7% to 3.3% average salary increase in US.

I had earlier written that IT professional salaries are expected to triple in 20 years, however, at this rate, it seeems that they will reach that figure in half the time.

The results, to be published in the forthcoming issue of Dataquest magazine, reveal that foreign multi national corporations (MNCs) pay higher salaries. And among MNCs, those engaged in R&D pay the highest. Not surprisingly, the Top 3 paymasters in the industry–Cadence, Sun Microsystems, Honeywell Technologies–were all engaged in R&D. Seven out of the Top 10 in the list included MNCs like IBM, Capgemini and CSC.

The industry average salary grew by 11% in 2007 to touch Rs. 6.2 lakh per annum. This growth is encouraging compared to a drop of 3% in the industry average salary in 2006. This average salary increase is considered significant considering that the software talent pool of the top 50 companies has grown sharply– at nearly 30-40% annually, in the last three years. It is generally expected that with the on-campus recruitment of thousands of freshers, the average salaries should go down.

Though Dataquest’s base of 31 companies surveyed comprised IT services players, R&D centres of software vendors, MNCs, hardware players and even systems integrators and resellers, no big disparities in salary levels were noticed.

While Cadence and Sun are the top paymasters for all employees with up to 10 years of experience, industry bellwether Infosys is more generous with the salaries of its senior and experienced employees. Infosys is one of the best paymasters for professionals between 10-15 years and more than 15 years of experience.

Going by the salary levels, the study says that for fresh engineers it makes sense to embark on a career in a Software R&D firms. For the more experienced professionals, it adds that, the salary levels at Infosys match with the best.

The survey points out that there is virtually no correlation between ‘salary levels’ and ‘satisfaction with salary’. While TCS employees rank their company at No. 4 in terms of ‘satisfaction with salary’ it is ranked at No. 13 in terms of salary. Infosys is ranked at No 12 in terms of salary but is ranked No. 28 in terms of ‘satisfaction with salary’.

The increase in salary has a direct impact on growth of India’s economy. Indian consumers now have much higher disposable incomes, which is directly proportional to the amount of spending they do. No wonder companies from across the globe a making a beeline to enter India in their quest to enter the pockets of cash rich Indian middle class consumers.

Is Offshoring / Outsourcing viable with this kind of salary growth for IT professionals ?

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Author: Arun Prabhudesai

Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin or get in touch with him at admin-at-trak-dot-in or 91.9822575676.

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