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Roundup: Hong Kong Woos IT Talents
If you are an Information Technology (IT) professional with one or more hot skills, you can happily enjoy your prime time in Hong Kong, since the region, bending on establishing itself as a science and technology hub, is desperately in need of IT talents.
Many IT professionals are not only seeing their salaries skyrocket on annual basis nowadays, but are now receiving unprecedented flexibility from their employers as well, a survey released newly by a global consulting firm said.
Hewitt Associates, a large consulting firm serves more than 75 percent of the Fortune 500, surveyed 216 large Hong Kong companies and reported data on 38,465 IT employees with so-called hot skills, namely, skills in short supply, high demand and experiencing rapid changes in market value.
It found that IT professionals with the hottest skills often are averaging base pay increase of more than 10 year per year, compared to national average annual increases of approximately 4 percent for non-IT salaries exempt U.S. employees.
On top of base pay, these guys are garnering additional compensation through a variety of bonus structures and stock options.
While bonuses are holding steady from last year to this year, with 66 percent of hot skills employees receiving a bonus of some type, the percentage of stock options granted has increased to 13 percent from last year's mark of 10 percent.
The study shows that "hot skills compensation is still growing," said Faye Lott, a Hewitt Associates IT compensation consultant.
"There continues to be rapid pay movements for skills with the highest demand, which is a trend that should continue well into the future," he predicted.
On Hewitt's Today's hot skills list, the first place goes to Network Engineering and the second to Data Visualization. Network engineers are typically responsible for client and server, and Internet and Intranet development, while Data visualization professionals apply techniques such as virtual reality to scientific and engineering projects.
Other hot skills of today include Web infrastructure, Data warehousing, numerical and non-numerical research, supply chain management, voice system engineering and web security.
Hewitt's Tomorrow Hot Skills list is a little bit different compared with Today's, but the core remains much alike: Internet-related hot skills will continue to be in high demand in tomorrow's Hong Kong.
The No.1 and No.2 hottest skills in tomorrow are Web content development and Web design and development, followed by Web infrastructure and Web security.
"With the ever-growing dot.com industry and the evolution of traditional companies to an e-business environment, IT professionals specializing in various aspects of the Internet should soon claim the honor of 'hottest of the hot skills,'" said Lott.
Since the Internet may impact business in ways people have never seen before, "IT and compensation managers everywhere may have a tremendous challenge on their hands to be competitive enough to attract the top talent with these specific skills," he said.
As ways to attract IT talents, the Hewitt survey suggests companies develop rational compensation philosophy, provide employees with room to learn and grow, and get employee input.
"While most exiting employees will say they are leaving because of pay they can't refuse, the bigger question should be what had them looking or receptive to offers in the first place," said Lott."You need to determine why the employee is really leaving, rarely is it just money." he said.
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