As global debt concerns and American political gridlock continued to drag down economies worldwide, the third quarter 2011 Yoh Index of Technology Wages found a bright note in the economic data. Wages paid by American corporations to highly skilled temporary workers increased a strong 6.85 percent in September 2011 vs. the same month in 2010, resulting in the biggest year-over-year increase since September 2009.
The increase showed that even as the American unemployment rate continued to languish at around 9 percent, wages for skilled temporary workers were increasing, suggesting a higher demand for the level of expertise needed in early stage economic recovery.
The Yoh index benchmarks the relative wage rate fluctuations of highly skilled temporary workers in technology, engineering, life sciences and health care. These technically proficient workers can command higher wages and set the ceiling for the job market as a whole.
"Two trends that jump from the numbers and provide optimism are the rate of increase in September 2011 as well as the acceleration of the rate of increase over July, August and September 2011 vs. the same months in 2010," said Lori Schultz, president of Yoh. September 2011 wages were 6.85 percent greater than September 2010, representing the biggest jump in three years, she noted. Moreover, the September year-over-year wage increase was nearly 50 percent better than the August 2011 figure and almost three and a half times better than the July 2011 year-over-year rate increase.
"This velocity suggests that skilled temporary professionals are finally beginning to gain much-needed leverage in the marketplace and they are using that leverage to seek higher wages," Schultz said. "This trend can only occur when job seekers believe that job demand is increasing and that there is less risk in rejecting a lower paying position today in anticipation that wages might be greater tomorrow."
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Skilled temporary professionals are beginning
to gain much-needed leverage and are using
that leverage to seek higher wages.
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New Technologies Driving Change
Such optimism is being fueled by fundamental changes in key industries, according to Yoh's analysis. For instance, the emergence of cloud computing is leading companies to invest heavily in rebuilding their application infrastructures to take advantage of required technologies such as HTML5 and virtualization. While cloud computing might, in time, impact employment at the low end of IT departments as their services are outsourced to cloud service providers, the need to re-engineer and migrate systems has opened opportunities for skilled IT professionals, developers and computer scientists.
At the same time, the 24/7 business environment has many companies rethinking how they do business. As a result, they're making investments to capitalize on the new competitive advantages offered by the convergence of mobile, Internet and consumer devices such as smart phones and tablet computers.
These opportunities might be larger than once expected, according to Yoh's analysis. For instance, organizations are just now realizing the need to gather and exploit the information flowing from customers, partners and employees as well as the traditional data sources IT has harvested. This could have a big impact on business as skilled workers will be needed to fill this demand in development, security, networking and infrastructure over the next five years.
"Increasing wages for skilled temporary employees is good news for the American economy and might suggest that the days of businesses being in the driver's seat—benefitting from stagnant or falling wages for their complex business initiatives—could be coming to an end," said Schultz. "This situation creates more uncertainty as businesses, for the first time in four years, have to contemplate how to support demand through effective workforce management. As the economic outlook brightens and workforce certainty becomes a more urgent issue, organizations will have to look to invest and grow rather than simply hoard and preserve."
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