(ISC)2, a non-profit security professional organization, delivered some encouraging news for IT workers this week, predicting that most enterprise companies will hire security specialists in 2010 to keep pace with surging malware and cyber attacks on their organizations.
Although the overall economy struggled through another year of bloodletting, more than 53 percent of the 2,980 security professionals surveyed said they received at least a small raise in 2009.
However, only 6 percent said they garnered a salary augmentation of more than 10 percent and the vast majority received pay boosts of less than 5 percent.
And while 53 percent of respondents said they were planning to hire security professionals this year, it may not make that big of a difference to the specialized work pool as a whole considering that 5 percent of people in the industry lost their jobs in 2009.
A little more than 47 percent reported that they expected no change in their information security budget for 2010.
“The results from our latest Career Impact Survey show that in a very difficult economic environment, organizations are placing an even higher value on the work that information security professionals do,” W. Hord Tipton, executive director for(ISC)2, said in a statement.
“It’s a sign of the private and public sectors’ ever-increasing dependence upon the stability and security of the online world, providing a plethora of career opportunities for knowledgeable, qualified, motivated security professionals,” he said.