Reality check

Use salary surveys to ensure you get your share when pay raises come back into vogue

Thirty years ago, Corky Pawlak, a respected master machinist, told me, 'You can't justifiably claim to be underpaid until you accept a job that pays more. That struck me as a bit of timeless wisdom, a bit of truth underlying capitalism at its finest. But the issue of being underpaid seldom arises, however, unless something generates a feeling of uncertainty about the current state of remuneration.

Please join me for a dive into the morass we call the Web in search of zero-cost, non-commercial, registration-free resources that reveal practical information about salary benchmarking, cost-of-living indices and other information that might be of value now that the economy is improving. Remember, we search the Web so you don't have to.

A disclaimer is in order, though. There's no guarantee the reported salaries are statistically representative. Sample sizes might be too small to achieve statistical significance. The results might be biased upward because people who feel underpaid can be reticent about blabbing that fact to the whole world.

Appropriate salaries
The first leg of our journey takes us to a non-profit organization based in Whittier, Calif. The Structural Engineers Association of Southern California is attempting to construct a worldwide database of engineering salaries. The coolest feature is that you can query the database and cut and paste raw data to a spreadsheet for offline analysis. For example, you might be interested in sorting the data by annual salary, highest degree earned, years of experience and professional registration. The only difficulty is that the data is delivered in units of 30 entries. This four-element search requires 37 screens to present fully. That's a lot of cut-and-paste, so you've got to be motivated. But, it is cool. If you're going to use this site, at least have the decency to add your numbers to the fray. In the long run, it will help everyone out there in readerland. Give your mouse a shovel and dispatch to www.seaint.org/SalarySurvey/ for some data mining.


It's easy to access this salary database.

Another free but lightweight salary survey is available from Abbott, Langer & Associates Inc., Crete, Ill. In the case of plant professionals, you can find a one-page list of salary numbers for directors, managers, supervisors and non-supervisory engineers. The report summarizes the 375-page 'Compensation of Plant/Facilities Maintenance/Engineering Managers and Engineers, 7th Edition - 2003'report the company has for sale. Mouse your way to www.abbottlanger.com/aipesumm.html for the scoop.

Bay Area Library & Information, San Mateo, Calif., also is in the survey game. Although the top half of the page at www.jobstar.org/tools/salary/sal-comp.cfm focuses on aspects of the computer industry, scroll to the lower half to access the salary surveys for engineers.
There's another survey at www.machinedesign.com/, the Web site for Machine Design magazine. Enter 'salary survey'in the search box found in the upper right corner and click the green 'Go'to access several articles that appeared in its pages. Keep in mind that the participants were readers of that publication and, if the title is truly indicative, probably not too involved in the day-to-day quest for outstanding plant engineering and maintenance success, as you folks are. Nevertheless, it can be useful background data.

The Web site operated by PayScale Inc., Seattle, reports only median salaries. If you rank a string of selected salary values from low to high, you'll find the median in the exact middle. Half the entries exceed the median, the rest fall short. Select a different population based on city, industry, experience, employer type, gender, age, degree, school, company sales, size of firm or work shift, and you'll get a different median. Each value, however, gives you a clearer picture of your paycheck. Send your mouse to the middle of www.payscale.com/salary-survey/ to gather more data.

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, provides job offer data (high, low, mean, median) for graduates in chemical, civil, environmental, electrical, computer, materials science and mechanical engineering at the bachelor, master and doctorate levels. The data is incomplete where fewer than four graduating students reported their data. Check out the latest buzz in salary compression at www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/career/employ/salary/cit.html.
In contrast, Human Resources Programs Development and Improvement, Richmond, Va., lists summary statistics for engineering and manufacturing salaries as furnished by HR departments in participating companies, not employees who self-report. This database is found at www.wageweb.com.

The salary survey on the Baker Thomsen Associates, Vancouver, Wash., site www.salaryexpert.com/ requires a bit more work. In addition to entering a job title and geographic location, you'll need to indicate the number of years you've been doing it, your current salary and three major job functions or responsibilities. From there, it flows by itself. The bottom of the home page has a cost-of-living calculator that requires answering sometimes rather ambiguous questions about costs. You might be asked the costs for electricity, a typical office visit to your doctor and taxes on your house. The questions appear to be situation-specific. I tried several inputs for salary, current city and destination city, and faced different questions for each attempt.