Am I underpaid as an IT professional?

[lordlad]

Hi Kryptonite,

I am in the same industry as you, Enterprise IT. I am not sure your area of focus but my field is System Infrastructure, specifically Virtualisation & Storage.

I can tell you though if you want to stay in IT and earn more, there's only 2 areas to get into, either Management (Project Management or just Management) or technical specialisation.

I started as Desktop Helpdesk early in my career and i knew that path is going nowhere so I focused and pinpoint myself to a specialisation that so far payout decently (6k monthly, age 31 this year, only diploma and no degree).

If you want to get into technical specialisation though, experience and industrial certification is important. If you want to get into networking, you will need all the advanced networking certification (CCIE, JNCIA, etc). If you want to go into systems, that you need to choose an area, other than desktop or general windows server administration as those are considered low-level and doesn't really pay well. Focus into some sort of specialisation like Exchange, Databases, etc......those pay well and open more doors.

my 2 cents.