“Premiums can be either added as bonus or as adjustment to base pay,” Foote offered in a recent podcast. “It’s very popular these days that those adjustments are made to base pay.”

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Employers are three times more likely to be hiring at higher salaries than having to lowball new hires. More importantly, hiring freezes are less frequent, down to 29 percent from 42 percent in 2004, and layoffs have also been cut, from 37 percent to 29 percent during that same two-year period. With such drastic measures on a downturn, a new staffing conundrum has taken the top slot of this year’s chart: the inability to fill all open spots.

One in three tech execs reported unstaffed positions this year. But with two-thirds of all IT professionals lending at least a casual eye to the classifieds, this carryover is not due to a lack of candidates.

“We have had major turnover at the senior level,” says Ken Teel, director of technology solutions at Liberty Community Services, noting a problem common to many as the job market heats up. “Changing landscapes at the senior level always mean changes further down the food chain.”

Whatever the particular impact this churn has on a given organization, morale seems to hang in the balance. Some, finally near full strength, are only just beginning to recover from years of being understaffed.

Room for improvement
Putting aside the good news, there’s plenty of room for improvement. For the second year in a row, less than half of all IT workers feel they are getting their due. Surely some smiles were bought in 2006, as this year’s gain of a full percentage point in compensation growth was accompanied by a full percentage point in satisfaction with pay. Enthusiasm, however, for how the workload and attitude toward IT have changed in the past few years is tepid. Only 45 percent of IT staff believe their compensation measures up -- the lowest pay satisfaction mark in the history of the survey.

Fewer IT staff reported a raise than did in 2005. What’s more, fewer cashed in on a new position. Low unemployment, at 3.4 percent, may in fact be sapping the strength of staff wages. Not to mention the fact that still-lean budgets have many employers tapping the talent pool tentatively with contract appointments.

“All the opportunities seem to be four- to eight-month contracts in distant locations,” says a document repository manager who works for a civic organization in Southern California.

For many, giving up full-time security is not worth the temporary boost in pay. And when the only options for improving your station are short-lived or far away, job satisfaction wanes. Worse, this tendency toward contract positions rather than full-time gigs is only part of a larger, evolving strategy companies are employing to establish competitive advantage. And whenever the staffing paradigm shifts, those with the most commodifiable skills sleep less.

Offshore dilemma
Certainly the most contentious development in staffing practices in the past five years is offshoring. Perceived or not, the panic is fast becoming pandemic, as IT professionals now rank offshoring as the No. 2 job threat, behind budget constraints. And with good reason. Among those who expressed knowledge of company staffing plans, 25 percent said their employers currently contract overseas, a third more than last year and two-thirds more than in 2004.