Salary Research: Jordan's Summary

If you've been following along this week, you know I've been talking about negotiating a salary for yourself, using Jordan as my example, and the research behind making your request for a raise based on facts, rather then feelings and impressions.  If you missed them, these were the first two posts in this series:

#1: Compensation Philosophy and Knowing if Your a Good Performer
#2: Market Research Strategies

Below is my summary of salary data for Jordan.  You'll see each job title on the left and each salary survey/database resource at the top.  The corresponding salaries fit in the middle.


Note - The median is the middle value in all of the data points in a given set. Using the median ensures that outliers (extreme lows and highs) don't factor into the data. 

Click on the image to see a larger version.

I'll explain each point.

#1: Averages
I have averaged the median value for each job title and shown the value as an annual salary and an hourly rate (based on a 40 hour work week)

#2: Averaged, the averages
Next, I averaged, the averages.  This give me a single market relevant salary for Jordan's job.  We come up with $53,638.97.

#3: Added 1.5% for inflation
The consumer price index (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/cpis02a-eng.htm) is one way of looking at the cost of living or inflation.  All of the research I did above was based on salary surveys conducted in 2012, so we must adjust the data to account for CPI.

Based on a CPI of 1.5%, I have shown five different ways that Jordan can approach discussing the actually dollar value of the raise he wants.  You can see it as a annual dollar value or percentage as well as monthly, weekly, or hourly rate increase.

Next up, now that the research is done - is the asking part.  I'll talk about that in the coming days.