Six of the world’s 10 highest-paying countries for information technology (IT) managers are in Western Europe, according to a new survey conducted by recruitment consultant Mercer. Switzerland leads the way in IT salaries – where the average salary for an IT manager is worth £74,150 a year – followed by Denmark, Belgium and the UK. The US and Canada rank sixth and eighth respectively.

The average UK salary was £62,180, reports Mercer, while in the US the average was just £56,550. The survey, which also named the least attractive countries in terms of remuneration, cited Vietnam as the country paying its IT managers the least. Here they could expect to earn just £8,140.

While outsourcing has lowered wages for lower-level skills, IT professionals in Western Europe and the US can still expect to be handsomely rewarded for their skills, says David Van De Voort, IT workforce specialist at Mercer: “The impact of outsourcing and off-shoring on IT roles in North America and Western Europe helps explain the pattern of global pay. Lower-level roles are being moved to regions where talent is cheaper; the jobs that remain in Western Europe and the US may be fewer in number but are more demanding and complex roles like vendor relationship manager, internal consultant and IT business partner.”

The survey also highlighted that the relationship between experience/skill level and pay varies in different countries. For example, large pay gaps exist between junior and senior career streams in Indonesia, India, Brazil, Chile and Vietnam, which have the highest pay progression ratios between the lowest and highest career streams. In the US and many western European nations, pay increases proportionately with experience.

Mercer’s 2007 survey of global IT pay rates compared remuneration packages for IT staff in 6,545 companies in 35 countries.