Tech wages going up and up, report says

Technical consultants, SAP AG functional consultants and hardware engineers were the highest paid hourly IT workers during the first quarter, according to the Yoh Index of Technology Wages, a compensation index that tracks outsourced tech workers.

On average, technical consultants received $83.72 per hour, SAP consultants earned $76.67 an hour and hardware engineers earned $75.68 hourly. ETL (extract, transform and load) developers, project managers, clinical research associates and database administrators followed.

Near the bottom of the list of the highest demand jobs were .Net developers, who earn an average of $53.40 per hour and Java developers who get $57.27 per hour.

Wages in the sector overall were up since Yoh started compiling the index in 2001. The average hourly wage for technology workers was $31.80 an hour at one point in the quarter, which Yoh Services LLC said is the highest average pay figure it has documented.

Compared to January 2006, wages in January of this year were up 5.5 percent, Yoh said.

The solid economy combined with trends such as Web 2.0 and social networking should continue to drive wage growth in the sector in the future, Yoh said.

Yoh, a staffing and recruitment company, created the index based on data it collected about as many as 5,000 workers that it placed in outsourced jobs in 1,000 companies in an array of industries including IT, telecommunications and engineering.