Are You Underpaid?
April 1st, 2008
In Salary.com’s 2006/2007 Employee Job Satisfaction and Retention Survey (from last year but still relevant), half of people who said they were looking for a new job were doing so because they felt they were underpaid. It’s the money, honey!
The question is, how do you decide if you’re not getting the compensation you deserve?
You can use Internet searches (Salary.com http://www.salary.com/ is a start) but it’s harder than it seems. Some tips:
1. Use job descriptions, not job titles, to compare your salary. A lot of titles don’t accurately reflect the job. Sometimes a boss gives you a title that makes you sound more important than maybe you really are (yes, it’s true!–they do this to (a) make you happier and (b) make you more credible to clients). A title that is more important-sounding than the job makes you look underpaid.
2. If you work for a small company, compare your salary to similar jobs at other small companies. If you work for a large corporation, look at what people like you are getting paid at other large corporations. Don’t compare your small-company paycheck to what your colleagues at the big companies get. It will only make you crazy.
3. Similarly, if you live in the Midwest, compare your salary to other jobs in the Midwest. If you live in New York City, compare yourself to other jobs in NYC or other big expensive areas. And so on.
4. Experience counts. If you’ve worked at a position for two years, you should count on earning less than someone doing the same work but who’s been doing it for ten years.
5. So does education. If you have four-year degree, compare yourself to other college grads. Same goes for master’s and Ph.Ds.
Do all this and you may find out you’re actually overpaid. It can happen. Salary.com did a big analysis of their survey and found out that of their respondents, 22% were underpaid, 15% were overpaid, and 33% were paid just about what was fair.
Article written by: Karen Burns, Working Girl, Working Girl
Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.
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