The survey of more than 3,000 IT professionals – including around 600 in the EMEA region  found tha–t more than half of information security professionals surveyed received salary increases in 2009, while less than 4% of participants lost their jobs.

Almost half of the EMEA professionals surveyed (47.9%) received salary increases in 2009. Less than ten percent (9.8%) of respondents saw their salaries and/or benefits cut, while 4.1% were laid off by their employers.

Of the 800-plus respondents who identified themselves as having hiring responsibilities, 55.2% said they were looking to hire permanent and/or contract employees in 2010.

Of those hiring, 28.2% said they will be hiring three or more information security professionals this year. For the EMEA region, ISC(2) says this represents a significant improvement over the previous year's survey, when just 11.0% would be hiring three or more new or contractor employees.

Over 90% of managers said their biggest hiring challenges were finding candidates with the right skills and the right amount of experience.

The hiring managers surveyed in EMEA said that they were looking for candidates with specific skills in these top five categories: operations security; information risk management; security management practices; telecommunications and network security, and ISO/IEC 17799 (Code of Practice for Information Security Management).

John Colley, EMEA managing director with ISC(2), said that harsh economic times is forcing many organisations to examine new, more cost-effective ways of accomplishing their goals.

"This is helping to enrich the career choices in information security, with more and more new business processes becoming dependent on a stable and secure online world", he said.

Other findings from the 2010 career impact survey, details of which will be announced at the Infosecurity Europe show in London next month, claim to show that 48.0% of EMEA respondents saw their IT security budgets decrease somewhat or significantly in 2009.

47.5%, meanwhile, expect no change in their budgets for 2010, compared to 72.0% of respondents who reported in the 2009 survey that their budgets had been reduced in the previous year.

The 2010 career impact survey was conducted from December 2009 to January 2010 with 2,980 respondents from 80 countries to gain insights into how the economic downturn affected the profession in 2009 and gauge the 2010 outlook.