In short, knowing how many IT staff you need is not a straightforward answer. There are many factors you’ll need to consider if you want to come to a truly accurate number; things like industry, the tech savviness of your workforce, and organizational size all come into play. Even the time zones you operate in can impact the final number.
The best thing you can do is consider each factor, decide on a ratio (the number of employees supported by each IT worker), and then refine your number through trial and error. Hopefully, we can help with the former part of this process.
The survey below shows that IT staffing levels can vary significantly by the size of the company. For example, the typical IT staffing ratio is 1:27 among all companies included in the survey. However, companies with 500 or fewer employees typically have an IT staffing ratio of about 1:18, while companies with 10,000 or more employees have a ratio of about 1:40.
Ratio of IT Staff to Total Employees
Organization Size |
25th Percentile |
50th Percentile (median) |
75th Percentile |
Org. Count |
By # Employees |
||||
| Less than 500 | 1:8 | 01:18 | 01:34 | 16 |
| 500 to <1,000 | 01:14 | 01:25 | 01:40 | 14 |
| 1,000 to <5,000 | 01:11 | 01:23 | 01:45 | 38 |
| 5,000 to <10,000 | 01:10 | 01:25 | 01:53 | 15 |
| 10,000 or more | 01:23 | 01:40 | 02:52 | 20 |
By Annual $ Volume |
||||
| Less than $200M | 01:11 | 01:19 | 01:34 | 25 |
| $200M to < $500M | 01:19 | 01:36 | 02:01 | 20 |
| $500M to < $1B | 01:11 | 01:31 | 01:53 | 17 |
| $1B to < $5B | 01:20 | 01:36 | 02:22 | 20 |
| $5B or More | 01:10 | 01:15 | 01:25 | 20 |
All Org. |
01:11 |
01:27 |
01:52 |
103 |
Survey shared with permission from Organizing for Results: IT Structures and Staffing Survey by people3, Mercer Human Resource Consulting, and ITAA.
Know your labor ratios beyond IT
The importance of labor ratios extends far beyond the limits of IT. While it is undoubtedly good to figure out exactly how much IT support to have on hand, it is arguably much more important (especially for shift-based businesses) to understand the ratio of customer-facing staff they need on a daily basis.
Figuring this out is no easy task. You’ll need to account for predicted customer demand, labor costs, role-based certifications, time off, and much more.
Luckily, in the age of AI, there is a way to let technology do all this thinking for you. With labor forecasting software, you can quickly determine the correct ratio of staff you need to meet demand during every shift. Check out how this works below:
Interested in learning more? Watch our free webinar below, where we dive into more details about labor forecasting best practices.
Under-staffing the IT personnel is a critical mistake many companies do. IT&C infrastructure complexity is increasing exponentially in almost all aspects while the general wrong tendency in companies is to reduce IT personnel. This results in over-work for existing personnel until the critical issues are no longer covered. The high tier high skilled personnel is assigned usual help-desk tasks or even technician tasks which leads to delaying or ignoring the critical infrastructure related tasks like server monitoring, intrusion prevention and overall security. This eventually leads to large downtimes company-wide and even complete infrastructure collapse.
Amen!
I wonder what the makeup of the IT departments were in this survey? Infrastructure only? Infrastructure and (third party) Application Support? In-House Software Development?
+1 – I can’t take this to my boss to argue for more personnel without that being defined.