Virtualization Jobs Offer "Premium Pay"
I must confess that in my blog of last Thursday, I was making a bit of a joke about the relative scarcity of virtualization pros, the validity of maintaining any kinds of statistics on specific virtualization job opportunities, and the overall state of the undersized virtualization job market.
Bill Reynolds of Foote Partners, whom I mentioned, responded to my comments by noting that he did a quick search on Foote's IT salaries and found virtualization skills, responsibilities, knowledge or experience mentioned in 12 of 145 job openings. "For all of these jobs, virtualization work, whether desktop, storage, servers, applications, data center, is a portion of what they do," Reynolds says.
He further confirmed what I jokingly declared when he described how Foote has been surveying full-time virtualization jobs, "but at the moment it's pretty new, and there aren't enough of these around to get any statistical validity."
Ever-vigilant, Foote has created two categories of virtualization skills: certified and non-certified. According to him, employers are definitely paying workers specifically for virtualization skill specializations. "We are tracking premium pay for 424 certs and skills in our IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index, Reynolds states, adding, "It can be part of salary or any number of cash bonuses -- performance, retention, sign on, etcetera."
So hey, there may not be many virtual pros per se out there, but it sounds to me like anybody who knows their way around a VM or a VDI may have a leg up on the competition. How long before we have vice presidents of virtualization?
Question: What workplace advantages to you have because of your virtualization knowledge and/or experience? E-mail your answers to me at [email protected].
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/26/2010 at 12:48 PM