IG Metall’s annual wage survey is now available online for the first time. At itk-entgeltanalyse.igmetall.de, employees can compare their earnings online with those of others performing comparable tasks. This is based on a job overview featuring 16 job families, organized into a total of 74 career levels.
Employees in the information technology and telecommunications (ITC) sector saw average income increases of 1.7% last year. The incomes of employees at companies covered by collective bargaining agreements rose by an average of 6.8% year-over-year, while employees at companies not covered by such agreements received an income increase of only 1.5%.
Christiane Benner, Second Chair of IG Metall: “This report increases transparency for employees regarding earnings in the IT sector. The survey results confirm that employees at companies bound by collective bargaining agreements are better paid. It can be assumed that young IT professionals will base their job decisions even more strongly in the future on whether their employer is bound by a collective bargaining agreement. Collective bargaining agreements are not only the foundation for better pay, but also for better working conditions overall, such as family-friendly work schedules.”
The positive impact of wages based on collective bargaining agreements is particularly evident in the case of software engineers. Compared to the previous year, they received a 10.2 percent increase in income at companies bound by collective bargaining agreements, while a 0.6 percent decline was observed at companies not bound by such agreements. Overall, the salaries of employees in this job category at companies bound by collective bargaining agreements are as much as 14 percent higher than those of employees at companies not bound by such agreements.
The data comes from the 2019/2020 compensation survey for this industry, which IG Metall publishes annually. With over 38,000 compensation data points from 112 companies, the survey provides a comprehensive overview of current annual salaries. In particular, the job overview offers an initial guide to the statistical compensation figures for individual jobs. Works councils, human resources departments, employment agencies, job centers, and interested professionals can thus, for example, track career progression in software engineering from the entry-level “Software Engineer 1” (SW1) to the Head of Software Development (SW5). Key metrics, such as the median and the statistical mean, are presented graphically, as are the differences between companies and individual values. Clicking on the info boxes reveals further details, including case counts and distinctions between fixed and variable compensation components. The compensation comparison also allows users to convert annual compensation into monthly and hourly rates, as well as to compare different weekly working hours.
Further information and press photos by Christiane Benner
