CIOs Tenures Shorten, IT Salaries Flatten, Says Janco

June 11, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

You might think that being a chief information officer gives you the best job security in the IT department, but research from Janco Associates suggests otherwise.

Janco, which monitors the job market and other compensation and worker issues in the IT sector, is putting together its mid-year IT salary survey, which comes out at the end of June, and did a survey of 438 companies in the United States, Europe, and South America to gauge the length of employment and salary levels of IT personnel. Janco put out a little teaser of information regarding CIOs to pique the interest of CIOs, their bosses, and their underlings ahead of that June report.

“We have seen a fairly steady change in the CIO positions for several months,” explained Victor Janulaitis, CEO at Janco, in a statement accompanying the figures. “As a result, we conducted a preliminary review of CIO turnover in a number of companies. The companies were of all sizes and our preliminary results are that the median length of employment was approximately four years and one month. There are a fair number of CIOs who have been in their positions for over five years, however many of them are close to retirement age. As a result we feel the tenure for the CIO will increase any time soon.”

Median distribution of CIO tenures. Source: Janco Associates.

I am no statistician, but the median tenure for the CIO should mean (pun intended) that half of the pool of CIOs have a length of employment at their current company that is under four years and one month and half should have an employment term that is greater than four years and one month. This number is not the mathematical average of tenures, which is the mean. I am a bit perplexed why the median is more useful than the range and the mean, but as I say, I am no stat guru. Anyway, it looks like the median is at 50 percent, on the Y axis, and that most of the tenures fall between two years and seven years.

What I did find interesting in the teaser data put out by Janco, aside from this wonderfully perplexing chart (mostly because I have not studied statistics, I think, and I am not ashamed of my ignorance to point it out), was that during the past twelve months, IT executive salaries at large enterprises are averaging $140,960, up a half percent, and at midrange companies are averaging $120,378, up one-tenth of a point in the past year. Not a lot of salary increases here. Across all IT professionals, the average salary among those surveyed (and presumably this is a weighted average across all the IT staffs in each company, not just the person taking the survey) was $77,873, up three-tenths of a point.