A survey by the Data Warehousing Institute shows that the average salary in the field declined from 2000 to 2001 by more than 1%.

InformationWeek Staff, Contributor

May 29, 2002

2 Min Read

Last year was not a good one for data warehousing professionals. Those who managed to hold on to a job saw their paychecks shrink, on average, by around $1,000.

A salary survey of 1,200 data warehousing and business-intelligence professionals released Wednesday by the Data Warehousing Institute shows that the average worldwide salary in the field declined from 2000 to 2001 by more than 1%, dropping from $78,884 in 2000 to $77,890 last year. This was the first time the average declined since the research firm began conducting this study four years ago.

The salary drop was felt mostly by the top guns and consultants on data warehousing projects, while those with specific skill sets were still seeing their salaries go up. "Salaries have gone down on the whole, but that's due to the fact that consultants have been hit hard by the [economic] decline, and the high-level architects who were hired by the dot-coms received really high salaries," says Wayne Eckerson, director of education and research at TDWI.

The report shows that 66% of the respondents saw at least a 4% salary increase last year, and 37% reported a raise of 6% or more. Yet the median salary stayed flat at $75,000 from 2000 to 2001. "The only way that can happen is if we get people off the charts," says Eckerson, who noted that many high-paid people in the field lost their jobs last year. The drop-off of exorbitant salaries from the survey was made up for by pay hikes for those in more hands-on implementation positions, he says. For instance, 31% of project managers in this study reported getting a 6% to 10% raise, compared with 2000, when only 25% received such a pay increase.

They made out better than their peers. According to InformationWeek's annual IT salary survey of 10,000 technology professionals released last month, IT managers face an 8% decline in total compensation and IT staff a rollback of 11% from 2001. Last year, the survey reported a 10% salary gain for managers and an 8.5% increase for staffers.

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