The Average Annual Salary of the IT Professionals in the Philippines

With most of the IT companies finding it more and more difficult to make things cost effective, the search of new destinations to outsource to has led Philippines as the next IT hot spot. The result is that IT has become one of the best paying sectors of the country with average annual salary figures well above the national average. As of now, IT is the biggest paymaster of the country and more and more people are looking to the sector for a fulfilling career. Moreover there are studies which say that even people who do not hold any specific qualifications in computing are making it big in the industry.

According to a salary benchmark survey conducted in 2008 by a well established technology research organization, it was revealed that the average annual salary of an IT industry employee in the Philippines is around 500,736 pesos.

Not only is this a pretty high wage level in national standards, it also puts the country in the list of Asian countries with the highest annual salary at the sixth place behind Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and India. The annual salary of these countries averages between USD 13,864 and USD 76,851. Philippines is now paying more than Indonesia, where the average annual salary is USD 7,709. This has decidedly impacted the country's living standard. The National Statistics Office of the country informs that the average annual family income of the country was 172,000 peso in 2006.

Such remarkable figures have been easy to come. Philippines has been rated at the bottom of the survey to study the number of tech workers who hold an IT certification from a technology vendor or institution. A paltry 24 percent of the people said that they hold at least one IT certification which would be useful in their job. Hong Kong again topped the survey with 48.9 percent. The low paying Indonesia was ranked at sixth with 28.6 percent certified employees.

The survey that is being referred to here got response from 2,521 IT professionals from the Philippines. These people are employed in various sub sectors of the IT industry. These IT professionals handle a range of job types, and come from different sized companies. At least 92.6 percent of these are full-time employees. The remaining 7 odd percent is made up of part-time contractors and independent consultants.

IT industry has always been a high paying one. Ever since it came to India, it revolutionized the country's economy. Within a decade, it became a big economic power. A similar change is visible in the Philippines as well. The annual salary of IT industry employees of the country is way higher than the average annual salary of most of the other sectors. Moreover annual salary increases in the sector are way higher than the increase in annual salaries of other sector employees. It would not be long before the IT industry employees start receiving the highest annual salary in the country and make Philippines a key economic power of Asia.

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