People working with small businesses in IT are seeing their wages fall faster than in any other sector, according to a new survey.

Experteer looked into the average wages of employees working in a number of industries including the public sector, financial services and consulting, concluding that IT salaries defy the trends set by other sectors, registering a fall and not a rise.

The drop was marked at four per cent for IT specialists, which Experteer credits to the greater decline in the number of jobs available.

Torsten Muth, Experteer's managing director, said: "Ambitious IT executives facing a fall in reward for their next step on the career ladder should consider whether their experience might be relevant to other industries in which salaries continue to rise, such as consulting and financial services."

One way many businesses may want to cut costs is to invest in cloud computing and outsourced materials, with Genesis Communications director Mark Seemann explaining that better services are now hosted for companies at a lower price than traditional off-the-shelf alternatives.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.