Market Research - Your Salary

On Monday, I began to talk about how to negotiate a better salary for yourself.  It started with a look at your companies compensation philosophy in general and then a bit about considering your performance at work.  Today, I'm going to write about market data.

Before you can conduct your search, you have to know your job title.  This is obvious right?  Well, maybe not so much.  Some companies like to make up job titles because their company is so 'unique' which doesn't help when you need to use industry job titles in order to do your research.  I would suggest that you spend a bit of time on Google, to get two or three different ways to describe your job (if you don't already know) - so that you can look up each job title.

The next thing you need to know is the typical education, and years of experience someone would need in order to get your job.  This isn't your current education and experience, but what someone external to the organisation might need in order to qualify.  Most of the salary databases/resources you use will provide a job description that include these details - this will help you narrow down your search.

I'm going to stick with using Jordan as my example.  He is called a Repair Dispatch Manager - which after a quick Google search will tell you employer's do use from time to time but enter that title into a salary survey database and you won't have much luck finding it.

The job titles I found that describe what he does include:

• Fleet Maintenance Supervisor
• Fleet Supervisor
• Warehouse Supervisor
• Transportation/Logistic Supervisor
• Dispatcher Sr./Manager
• Equipment Coordinator
• Maintenance Planner
• Dispatcher

Okay, so I'm a bit ridiculous - that is a lot of titles, and you probably don't need that many but I like to be thorough so I used each and every one.  As you enter the job title into each online salary resource, you'll find that not every resources has every job (another reason why it's good to use multiple titles and multiple salary resources/databases).

The job descriptions for each of these titles was similar, as was the years of experience and credentials - and he does a bit from each of these jobs - but no single one matches his profile exactly.  So collecting data from each source is going to help us get an accurate picture of a reasonable salary for him.

There are a lot of free sources of data you can explore online - these are some Canadian resources that I like.

• http://www.payscale.com/
• http://monsterca.salary.com/CanadaSalaryWizard/LayoutScripts/Swzl_NewSearch.aspx
• http://www.salaryexpert.com/
• http://alis.alberta.ca/wageinfo/Content/RequestAction.asp?format=html&aspAction=GetWageHomePage&Page=Home
• http://www.hays.ca/salaryguide/index.htm

In the coming days, I'll share with you my summary of Jordan's salary data and what (if any) raise, I think he should ask for this year.