Hiring Trends: Information Security Bucks the Recession - David Foote, Foote Partners

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The economy has been down, but job opportunities are up for information security professionals with the right skills.

This is the posture of David Foote, CEO and chief research officer of Foote Partners, an IT workforce research firm.

In an exclusive interview, Foote discusses:

Foote has long been one of the nation's leading industry analysts tracking, analyzing, and reporting on IT workforce management and compensation practices, trends and issues. His columns, articles and contributions appear regularly in dozens of publications. As Foote Partners' CEO and Chief Research Officer since 1997, David leads a senior team of experienced former McKinsey & Company, Gartner, META Group, and Towers Perrin analysts and consultants, and former HR, IT, and business executives, in advising governments and corporations worldwide on increasing performance and managing IT's impact on their businesses and customers. Prior to co-founding Foote Partners in 1997, David was an analyst and consultant with Gartner and META Group, co-founding and directing META's executive service for Chief Information Officers and leading the firm's IT Human Capital Management and Compensation research practices.

TOM FIELD: Hi this is Tom Field, Editorial Director with Information Security Media Group. We are talking today about the IT workforce, and we are talking with David Foote, Co-Founder, CEO and Chief Research Officer with Foote Partners, an IT workforce research firm. David, thanks so much for joining me today.

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DAVID FOOTE: You bet Tom.

FIELD: Just to get us started here, why don't you tell us a bit about yourself, about your firm and exactly what you do?

FOOTE: Well, we are bunch of analysts that come out of the big analyst firms. We have been around for about 12 years. I worked as a partner in another group. Our focus is mainly, in a nutshell, on the execution of the IT organization versus the recommendations on the purchasing of hardware, middleware, software. We look very much at the world from what happens once you have these purchases. This largely becomes an issue of workforce. So, we have developed a lot of independent research, benchmark research, that I will be drawing from today, and that involves a group of about just over 2,000 companies in the U.S. and Canada and covering close to -- I think we are up to about 89,000 IT workers, and we publish benchmark research on them, and we also look to this group for a lot of our analysis and what is happening out there in the markets, as we test some of the data that we are seeing. So, it allows us to draw a lot of inferences about trends in the market -- hard data and empirical data.

FIELD: Now, I have seen some of your compensation surveys, and they indicate that pay for IT security skills and certifications has continued to rise, despite the recession. What do you see as driving that rise?

FOOTE: Well, you know the easy answer might be compliance, and you would be partially correct. But you would be missing most of what we see as the main drivers. There has been a big shift, particularly in budgets, from external threat defense to protecting data assets, and this has obviously created a big shift in the demand for the kind of skills and people you need to be doing this. In fact, in a CSO/CISO survey that we do twice a year, data security now has come up as the number one issue for security decision makers. And if you look at budgets right now, you have got IT budgets this year that are down about between 7 and 9 percent, depending on what analyst firm you look at, but it is interesting that security budgets this year are basically flat, and part of this is because the percent of the IT operational budget devoted to security was 7.2 percent in 2007, but now in 2009 it has risen to 12.6 percent.

So, we have taken a larger chunk of the IT budget, which even if that is declining, that keeps security again at pretty much a flat point. We are going to spend about as much money this year as last year.