It should be a great time to be a testing specialist working for a financial firm. Competition among firms to acquire the right skill-sets has never been more fierce. But are you getting the raise and bonus you deserve this year?
QA-Financial.com has partnered with Emolument.com – the leading salary database – to provide its readers with a unique salary benchmarking service. In exchange for confidentially sharing of salary and bonus information, in return you will receive a salary benchmark report for your role and your level of experience. Just click here to find out how you can take part.
We took a look at Emolument’s current data for 493 testing and QA professionals, which shows:
The median salary (including bonuses) for testers working in finance in the UK are £43,500, which is comfortably ahead of the median £39,000 paid to their peers working for consulting and professional services firms, the next highest paid group of testers.
Testers working in the US are paid 30% more than testers working in the UK. The media salary in the US for testers working across all industry groups is £49,000, compared to £37,500 in the UK. But testers in the UK are still ahead of those working in the Netherlands (£35,000), Canada (£32,500) and Ireland (£30,000). Testers working in India earn a median £9,500.
Not surprisingly, developers are paid more than testers. Median developer pay for software developers working for financial services firms in the UK is £52,000 versus the £43,500 paid to testers. Salaries are again substantially higher in the US where, across all industries, the median is £66,000.
Java is best programming language that attracts the highest pay for UK-based developers – a median of £51,000 across all industries. That’s followed by C++ (£49,000), C# (£48,000) and Python (£43,000). Java contractors are paid an average daily rate of £500. According to Emolument Java, C++ and C# are the three most popular languages in the finance sector, which still offers most of the best paying IT jobs.
