Reseller pay packets: Staff earn £10k more than national average

Average wage across UK's top 350 VARs, MSPs and tech consultancies growing just above inflation, according to CRN research

The average salary paid by the UK's top resellers is over £10,000 above the national, full-time average.

That's according to analysis of wage data disclosed in the annual accounts of the UK's top 350 resellers, MSPs and consultancies, as ranked in the CRN VAR 350.

Published today, CRN Essential's Staff & Salaries report can be viewed here by CRN Essential subscribers (see here for more information on how to become a subscriber).

Among the 285 resellers who disclosed the relevant information, mean wages rose by 2.3 per cent to £47,920 in their latest years on record - over £10,000 more than the £37,428 mean salary for full-time UK employees.

CRN's Staff & Salaries report aims to answer two very simple questions, namely how many staff the UK's top front-line tech providers employ, and how much they pay them.

Not only this, but how many staff they employ and how much they pay them by geographic region, by business type, by company size - and even by gender.

Here we reveal the key takeaways from the report:

■ The regional pay gap is widening

The yawning pay delta between London and more affluent areas of southern England on the one hand, and the rest of the UK on the other, will surprise no one.

More noteworthy is the fact that this disparity appears to be widening, with average pay at companies based in the capital vaulting by 5.8 per cent year on year.

This means average salaries at London outfits, at £59,513, aren't far off twice the average salary of those based in Yorkshire and the Humber (£33,984).

■ Berkshire is brimming with resellers

Despite the high staff costs, the Thames Valley remains the prime hotspot for reseller HQs, with Berkshire and Buckinghamshire playing host to more VARs per million inhabitants than all other counties.

That said, certain pockets of the north of England hold their own, with Cheshire and West Yorkshire ensuring the Home Counties don't have a monopoly when it comes toVAR density.

■ Cybersecurity wage inflation is cooling

Cybersecurity remains white-hot when it comes to pay, with firms specialising in this domain stumping up average wages of £64,161 - more than £7,000 more than any other of the six other specialist sectors we tracked.

But although cybersecurity salaries rose slightly above the VAR 350 average, the 3.5 per cent hike recorded actually represents a cooling from the frenetic wage inflation seen in the sector in previous years. Last year, the average wage increase among the cybersecurity providers we tracked was 5.2 per cent. And it stood at a whopping 9.7 per cent the year before that.

■ It's crunch time for gender pay

The larger firms in our industry have - so far - demonstrated scant headway on their gender pay gaps, but that may change this spring when the latest pay gap informationis divulged.

Judging from the comments in last year's reports, the UK's top VARs, SIs and MSPs have been working hard on a number of fronts to attract, retain and promote more female talent, and 5 April 2020 is realistically the first juncture at which the fruits of these efforts will been visible.