What will be the salaries of IT specialists in 2021 – expert forecasts

IT recruiting has never been easy: in this area, demand continues to outstrip supply, even with numerous courses, online universities, and other training programs that confidently guarantee employment upon completion.

A lot has changed over this year, and well-known circumstances have left their mark on the field of IT hiring.

First, a serious surge in activity in the field of e-commerce and online services has led to an increase in the already high demand for IT specialists. In an overheated market, a typical applicant is guided not by the market value of the candidate, but by those financial conditions that will be comfortable for his work and development.

Second, the proven remote work experience has demonstrated even to conservative companies that telecommuting is not much different from office work. Thus, a developer from a small provincial town with an average salary of about 25 thousand can count on a remuneration by metropolitan standards. IT companies, which previously purposefully opened regional offices, are now forced not only to compete for job seekers, but also to raise wages to keep up with the proposals of remote employers.

In 2021, we expect the salaries of junior and middle developers in cities with a population of one million to grow by 10-15%. In regional centers, growth will be up to 30%. For senior developers, salaries will grow more slowly.

Thirdly, due to the development of the programming courses already mentioned at the very beginning of the article, the gradation of junior, middle and senior is changing. In advertising such training programs, you can often see loud promises to make a middle-developer out of a neophyte within 6 months, and young specialists sincerely believe that after a small project you can assign yourself such a level. In turn, after 5 years of experience, middle specialists already have a desire to sell themselves as a senior or architect. Unfortunately, as practice shows, skills and competence do not always coincide with gradation.

How should an IT employer act in such conditions and what strategy should he adhere to? The upward trend in wages will continue for at least another five years. IT giants will not change the tactics of buying out good specialists, and the rest of the market players will have to increase their financial offer by 10-15% annually. In our company, candidates are offered not only a fixed salary, but also bonuses that can be paid for half a year or a year. This makes the conditions more attractive for the job seeker, and the company gets an employee interested in the result.

Other incentive payments are offered when hiring. For developers, there are awards for project merit, when the manager, before the release, motivates employees to deliver the product within a certain period and receive a one-time bonus. Or when technical support specialists exceed the established norms for processing requests, they also receive a bonus payment for each overfulfilled request.

If we talk about the difference in salaries by technology, then when a narrow-profile specialist is needed here and now to solve a specific problem, we focus on the needs and desires of the candidate, and not on the market value, which is influenced by the strategies of hiring IT giants, or our own understanding.

Graduates of courses who position themselves as middle-developers will not deceive our recruiters: we train interviewers to avoid such mistakes when hiring and evaluate, first of all, the practical experience of the applicant. All candidates who pass the initial screening at the stage of communication with a recruiter undergo a thorough technical interview, during which the expert adequately assesses the depth of knowledge and competencies.

The number of spheres of life that have not yet been covered by technology is rapidly decreasing. Telemedicine and other promising technologies are looming on the horizon, which means that we may not wait at all for the demand for developers to catch up with the supply. It seems that we can only hope for those very graduates of online courses.