by Dirk Dusharme

If you like numbers (And what self-respecting quality professional doesn’t?), salary surveys present hours of entertainment. This is particularly true if you try to correlate survey results to your own situation or if you compare one year’s results to another’s.

Questions abound: “Why don’t I make as much as what the survey shows I should?” “Why does a vice president make more than a president or CEO?” “Should I move to the West Coast, home of higher salaries, Starbucks and a governor who can bench press twice his weight in quality consultants?”

Unfortunately, we can’t answer these questions. However, we can present all the data, let you draw your own conclusions and offer a few observations of our own.

If you’re new to salary surveys, here are some of the rules: A survey of this type is only a guideline, a yardstick that gives some indication of where your salary should be relative to other positions--not an absolute indicator of how much you should be making. To get the most out of the data, look at your position from every angle: regional, industry and broad title classification (e.g., executive, manager, technical). This will give you a general idea of where you stand. If you find your salary is much lower than the average salary, no matter which table you look at, you may have cause for concern.

Keep in mind that as table categories get more specific (e.g., female supervisor in the Western United States), the number of respondents contributing to that category gets smaller. Therefore, the data may not be as representative as a larger sample. So be sure you take into account both the average salary and the number of respondents shown in superscript (e.g., $29,300 ³⁷).

Try to find similar surveys to compare with this one. The more data you have, the better. If you’re a member of the American Society for Quality, you have access to its yearly salary survey at www.asq.org. Your particular industry association may also have salary guidelines. The American Society of Association Executives (www.asaenet.org) is a good place to find an association that represents your industry.

Gender and location

It’s still here, and it’s still worth mentioning. No matter how you slice it--by region, by age or by years of experience--women make less money than men in the same position. By region, women earn anywhere from 14 to 18 percent less than men. With the exception of the Western region, this is somewhat less disparate than we found two years ago, as illustrated at the top of page 23 (download complete article).

We can’t explain the huge jump in the wage gap in the Western states from 2002 to 2004. Even omitting some outliers (one male executive earned close to $1 million) only brought the gap down to about 14 percent, still a big jump from 2002 and consistent with the other regions.

By title, the gender gap ranges from 5 to 30 percent; this excludes two job titles, president/CEO and inspector, for which there were too few female respondents from which to derive meaningful results.

Did we mention location? The graph on page 22 (download complete article) shows that for better salaries, one needs only to head west or east. Salaries in the West and Northeast are about the same, close to 10 percent higher than in the Southern or North Central states.

Go to school

It should be no surprise that education improves your personal bottom line. Whether formal schooling, in-house training or certification courses such as those offered by ASQ or other industry trade associations, you’re more valuable to your employer if you have more training.

How much more? In general, you can expect to earn about 4 to 5 percent more with a two-year college degree (i.e., associate’s degree) than you would with only a high-school/GED or vocational school degree. Hang out in college for another couple of years, party light and pick up a bachelor’s degree for a salary increase of about an additional 13 to 15 percent. About 39 percent of our respondents have a four-year degree.

For the truly devoted, the survey shows at least an additional 15 percent increase for master’s and doctorate degrees. See the chart on page 28 for a bird’s-eye view of salary averages for men and women for various education levels.

In rough terms, by going to college for four years, you will increase your potential salary by about 30 percent. Get your Ph.D., and your income potential is almost 70 percent higher than a high school or vocational school graduate.

If you can’t go to school full-time, consider going part-time. Our survey results show that as useful as technical certificates are, they’re no substitute--from a salary perspective--for a college degree.

This isn’t to say you should pass up acquiring relevant certificates; they can enhance your salary, too. Most industry associations and some large companies offer training relative to your job function. ASQ offers training and certification for 11 technical or auditing certificates. Both ASQ and Quality Digest tabulate the benefits of those certificates on salaries. You might expect these certificates to have a positive effect. However, it’s tough to gauge, as it’s largely dependent on the industry and the specific function that an employee performs within a company.

At the bottom of each of the executive, management, technical and other categories at the bottom of page 23 (download complete article) is a comparison of overall salaries with and without ASQ certification. For both the United States and Canada, the survey shows a slight salary advantage for those with an ASQ certificate. The exception for both countries is the executive category.

Another table on page 23 (download complete article) displays the specific job titles that make up the top three-quarters of survey respondents. Again, for the most part, these titles benefit from certification. There are two exceptions: As with the previous table, the executive title of “director” was not helped by certification, nor was the title of “technician.” About the same results for director and technician titles are also reflected in ASQ’s 2003 salary survey.

A possible reason executive positions receive no value from certification is that employees in these positions probably don’t require certification to perform their jobs. It’s likely many of these respondents earned their certificates well before moving to executive positions.

A belt by any color

More than 15 percent of survey respondents have some sort of Six Sigma title: Green Belt, Black Belt or Master Black Belt. Our yearly Six Sigma survey has shown that companies with a Six Sigma program in place usually reward those employees who have a Six Sigma certification. From Green Belt to Master Black Belt, the higher the belt, the more responsibility and the higher the salary.

Because relatively few companies have a Six Sigma program in place and because we don’t know whether a respondent without a belt works for a Six Sigma company or not (and therefore whether a belt is valued), it’s a little misleading to compare Six Sigma belt holders to nonholders. We’ll do it anyway, but keep that caveat in mind.

The table (download complete article) compares the top three job titles that have belts to those same titles without belts. Of those respondents who have a Six Sigma belt, 50 percent are Green Belts with an average salary of $70,533. About 35 percent are Black Belts, earning an average salary of $76,233. Master Black Belts earn an average of $99,442 and make up 9 percent of those with a Six Sigma belt. The remaining 7 percent are made up of those with something other than one of the standard belts with an average salary of $58,400.

Methodology

Quality Digest contacted 43,303 subscribers by e-mail and invited them to take the salary survey online. Of those, we received more than 3,000 responses. Weeding out invalid or incomplete responses, there were 2,645 valid submissions from the United States and 351 from Canada. These two groups became the basis for our analysis.

Because of the relatively small number of Canadian responses, we were only able to do a broad analysis of Canadian salaries.

More than 84 percent of the respondents indicated that they were quality professionals, although, we presume the actual percentage is probably higher; many respondents may have generic titles, like technician, yet perform a quality function. For the rough breakdown of respondents, see the tables on pages 23 (download complete article).

About the author

Dirk Dusharme is Quality Digest’s technology editor.