London's CIOs to see average salary rise to £185,000 a year

Meanwhile, IT contractors are seeing huge year-on-year pay rises of up to 13 per cent

CIOs in London's IT, banking and financial services sectors could see their salaries rise by up to £10,000, according to the results of a survey by recruitment firm Robert Walters.

The firm's Salary Survey 2014, based on an analysis of placements it made throughout 2013 and other supporting research, found that some of the steepest increases in salary from 2013 to 2014 were for CTOs and CIOs, with average salaries for both roles jumping from £175,000 in 2013 to about £185,000 in 2014.

In the north-west, in the IT sector, there has been no shift in the average salaries of CIOs (£115,000), CTOs (£115,000) or heads of IT (£97,500).

A similar survey by financial services recruitment firm Robert Half found that CIOs in the UK earned an average salary of between £117,750 and £225,000+ in 2013, which was forecast to increase by 2.3 per cent in 2014 to between £120,500 and £230,000.

Meanwhile, IT contractors are enjoying year-on-year pay rises of up to 13 per cent, the survey found.

Robert Walters found that an increase in demand for new IT skills and an ongoing IT skills shortage have led to rises in salaries for the best candidates.

In London's banking sector, Robert Walters found that there has been an increase in front office IT recruitment as banks shifted their focus from regulatory and compliance issues to revenue generation.

The company said that in 2013, banks had recruited personnel who specialise in Java, C++ and C# and Python, while there was a notable increase in Scala requirements among e-commerce and investment banking firms within the capital. The report said there was also an emergence of Android "as the new Linux", meaning that there would be a demand for IT professionals with expertise in the operating system.

In the commerce space, the survey found that IT professionals with expertise in point of sale (POS), retail business systems, loyalty and vouchering were in demand, as were mobile commerce specialists and people with agile project experience on e-commerce platforms. Salaries in the e-commerce and mobile technology spaces are expected to rise in 2014 by an average of seven per cent for permanent employees and five per cent for contractors.

In the Midlands, there were shortages of Java and .Net developers, which Robert Walters claimed is causing a spike in contractor hires - with pay up by as much as 12 per cent across the region.

Meanwhile in the north-west there remains a big demand for skills in e-commerce, change management and business intelligence, it said. The survey found that shortages of VMware experts and front-end developers have resulted in average pay rises of up to six per cent across the region.