Are You Satisfied?

The Windows IT Pro Industry Survey 2005 gave us a wealth of data about many aspects of your professional life. What's most interesting about this mountain of information is how many additional questions it elicits. A case in point is the topic of job satisfaction. Although the survey includes a point-blank question about job satisfaction, I found, as I thought further about your answers to that question, that those answers weren't enough to really understand why you were or were not satisfied with your job. So I went on a mining expedition to uncover the whys and wherefores of IT pro job satisfaction. Here's what I did and what I found.

An Answer, and a Lot of Questions
Our survey asked, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your current position?" and invited respondents to choose responses from a 5-point Likert Scale that ranged from Totally Dissatisfied to Totally Satisfied. Figure 1 breaks out the question's 1726 responses into percentages. The average satisfaction level for our survey respondents is 2.2, just slightly—really slightly—above the Somewhat Dissatisfied level. Even more telling is that 76 percent of respondents are either somewhat or totally dissatisfied with their current position. Only 15 percent are somewhat or totally satisfied with their position, and 9 percent are floating in the nebulous "neither satisfied nor dissatisfied" realm.

These numbers point toward a general dissatisfaction in varying degrees among IT pros with their currently held position. A natural question that ensues from even a casual glance at the percentages is, "What's up here?" Are we looking at dissatisfaction with working for particular employers, in specific market sectors, in certain IT jobs, or did we simply catch 76 percent of our survey respondents on a bad day? I dove into the survey and dug a little deeper for some more specific pointers to why most IT pros are dissatisfied to some degree with their job.

Eliminating the Obvious
I looked first at job satisfaction by gender. The percentage of male and female respondents to our survey stands at 89 percent and 11 percent, respectively. I was fairly certain that the percentages Figure 1 shows would hold true for male and female IT pros, and as it turns out, that assumption is pretty much true. Compare the following to the percentages in Figure 1:

• 20 percent of male and 18 percent of female respondents are totally dissatisfied with their job
• 56 percent of both male and female respondents are somewhat dissatisfied with their job
• 10 percent of male respondents and 6 percent of female respondents are neither dissatisfied nor satisfied with their job
• 11 percent of male respondents and 17 percent of female respondents are somewhat satisfied with their job (the largest spread between genders for this category)
• 3 percent of both male and female respondents are totally satisfied with their job

It looks like female IT pros are a little more satisfied with their job than male IT pros are, which might come as a surprise to some, but the gap is a small one.

Then, I looked at job satisfaction by age. The variances here are interesting, if not earth-shattering. More 20-29-year-olds (12 percent) are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with their job than are respondents in any other age group but one, and much fewer (1 percent) are totally satisfied with their job than respondents in any other age group. The 30-39 and 40-49 age groups for the most part mirror the overall job satisfaction percentages. Variations occur for the 30-39 group in the neither satisfied nor dissatisfied category (high at 11 percent); and for the 40-49 age group in the neither satisfied nor dissatisfied category (low at 7 percent) and the totally satisfied category (slightly low at 2 percent). Fifty-59-year-olds vary from the overall percentages only in the neither/nor category, where only 7 percent are sitting the fence. Finally, the 60 years and older group showed the greatest variation among the satisfaction categories. More IT pros in this age group (24 percent) are totally dissatisfied with their job than are respondents in any other group. Fewer in this age group (39 percent) are slightly dissatisfied than in any other group. The 60 years and up group rivals the 20-29 years group in being noncommittal—12 percent are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with their job. But the slightly satisfied category is where the 60 and older group really shines, with 21 percent slightly satisfied, in contrast to the overall percentage of 12 percent in the slightly satisfied category.

Show Me the Money
Trying to determine whether age or gender makes a difference in job satisfaction was an interesting exercise, though ultimately not an illuminating one. There is virtually no difference in job satisfaction levels between female and male IT pros, and differences by age group aren't significant. Even IT pros in the 60 years and older group, by far the least unsatisfied with their job of all the age groups, still rack up a combined 64 percent in the totally and somewhat dissatisfied categories. For all other age groups, the percentage in those two categories climbs to higher than 70 percent.

The survey question that sheds the most light on IT pros' current job satisfaction asks, "How would you rate the influence of each of the following factors on your overall job satisfaction?" The factor with the greatest influence on job satisfaction is compensation. The Likert Scale that accompanies this question groups responses to 10 factors in the following categories: No influence, Somewhat influential, Influential, Very Influential, and Critical. Figure 2 summarizes the responses to this question. Eighty-five percent of survey respondents ranked this factor as Somewhat influential, Influential, Very influential, or Critical. In fact, the average score for this question is 3.61, which means that a majority of respondents find their compensation level to be an influential to very influential factor in their job satisfaction. (For an in-depth analysis of the salary information our survey gathered, see Jason Bovberg, "The Money You Make and How It Compares," page 27.)

Clearly, not being paid enough is a major player in job satisfaction levels for IT pros. And if you look only at Figure 2, you might think that inadequate compensation is the major player. That's what I was tempted to think— until I dug a little more deeply and looked at the answers to the intriguing survey question, "Do you feel your company adequately compensates you for the work you do?" Surprisingly, 49.6 percent of respondents answeredYes to that question, and 50.4 percent answered No. Splits don't get much more even than that.

The situation is seemingly contradictory: 76 percent of our survey respondents are dissatisfied with their current job, 85 percent of respondents rate their compensation as influential to various degrees in their dissatisfaction, but only 50.4 percent believe they aren't adequately compensated for the work they do. So what's going on here?