| by Dirk Dusharme
The last year has been tough for many industries, and when times get tough the budget for one department tends to get hit harder than others. Can you guess which? It starts with “Q” and rhymes with “frivolity,” only it isn’t so funny. Many of our readers who perform a quality function have experienced layoffs or salary and benefits cuts. Therefore, it’s not surprising that we’ve gotten more than the average number of requests regarding our next salary survey.
Let me save you some time--if you simply want to know how your salary (assuming you have one) compares to others with the same or similar titles, see the tables on pages 36 and 37. If you’re in middle or upper management, the table on page 38 may be a better representation of salary for your position. Keep in mind that these figures are only guidelines. Many other factors come into play: gender, region, years of experience and education, to name just a few. To get the best idea of what your salary should be, look at all the tables presented here, as well as surveys from other sources. A good source for quality professionals is the American Society for Quality’s yearly salary survey (www.asq.org). Industry-specific associations and credit unions may also have salary information, which is often sent to a company’s human resources department, so be sure to check there as well. If you’re unsure whether your industry has an association, try looking it up on the American Society of Association Executives Web site (www.asaenet.org).
If you’re a woman, you should count on making less than your male counterparts--but you already know that.
Even though passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 led to a downward trend in wage disparity based on sex, the glass ceiling is still alive and well. A June 1998 report, “Explaining Trends in the Gender Wage Gap” by the Council of Economic Advisors, tried to explain some of the gap, stating that “about one-third of the gender pay gap was explained by differences in the skills and experience that women bring to the labor market and about 28 percent was due to differences in industry, occupation, and union status among men and women.” Despite that, the report acknowledged that “these differences raised the female/male pay ratio in the late 1980s from about 72 percent to about 88 percent, leaving around 12 percent as an ‘unexplained’ difference.”
That pesky 12 percent is still with us. Although it varies by region, in our survey women earn anywhere from 10 percent to 19 percent less than men. The gap is less in Western and Northeastern states, where the gap is 14 percent and 10 percent respectively, and jumps appreciably in the Southern and North Central states, where the gap is 19 percent and 18 percent respectively. Women directors, managers and engineers had a smaller wage gap (9%) than women with other titles. As shown on the table on the right-hand side of this page, the gap is consistent with last year’s findings. It is also consistent with ASQ’s annual survey.
For those tempted to think that the gap is a result of a large number of unskilled or unschooled women pulling down the overall female average, the table on page 38 shows that the gap holds true no matter how you slice it. Whether by age, years experience or years at company, women make less than men. Education doesn’t seem to help, as shown on the graph at the bottom right-hand side of this page.
We beat on this subject year after year because seven out of 10 of you reading this article are managers and most likely have a say over how much your employees are getting paid.
If anyone cares to discuss this issue, we have opened a topic-specific forum on our Web site. Go to www.qualitydigest.com and click on the “Glass Ceiling” link on the home page. This discussion will be open until June 3.
In general, a higher education means a better income. Our survey shows that a vocational/technical degree or two-year college degree only provides a small increase in potential salary compared to a high school diploma or GED. The average woman will increase her potential salary by about $11,500 by attending college for an extra two years. The average man will increase his potential salary by about $12,500. Put another way, if you grind through an extra two years of college to get a four-year degree, you can just about pay it off in the next two years of employment. That’s a quick return on investment by anyone’s standards.
Pursuing a master’s or doctorate will increase your salary potential even further, as seen on the table at the bottom of this page.
Attaining industry certificates is another good way to beef up your résumé and increase your salary potential. The ASQ and other industry associations offer a variety of certificate courses, as do private training and consulting firms. Earning a technical or management certificate from the ASQ can help increase your salary, as seen on the table on page 38. You’ll note a couple of anomalies on the table--the titles of ISO coordinator and technician show a decrease in salary as a result of certification. We don’t know why. But because it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (why would you be penalized for learning?), we assume that some other influence is at work.
Six Sigma certification can also be
very important, depending on your company. For companies with a Six Sigma
program in place, the value of Six Sigma is recognized, and employees are usually rewarded for achieving a Six Sigma belt. In some companies, you can’t even be promoted if you haven’t had Six Sigma training.
We don’t know what the value is for companies without a Six Sigma program. This most likely will depend upon managers’ knowledge of Six Sigma and their perception of whether those skills are valuable to the company even if it doesn’t have a Six Sigma program in place. Our advice is that if you can pursue a Six Sigma belt, do it. Even if Six Sigma is a passing fad (some say the interest is waning), the statistical and problem-solving tools are tried and true, invaluable and, as with any job knowledge, at some point will improve your personal bottom line.
Whether you quit, are contemplating quitting or were part of your company’s latest economic revitalization program (i.e., laid off), take heart. Although not as high as expected, employment is up nationwide. So is voluntary turnover (i.e., “take this job and…”), according to the February 2005 issue of BusinessWeek.
Our survey, past surveys and experience have shown us that new hires tend to earn more than those who already have up to five years or so into a company (see table above). During a decent economy, companies need to pay a premium to bring good employees onboard. It’s not unusual for a new hire to be paid more than an existing employee with the same level of skill and experience.
Of course, the more education and certificates you hold, the more valuable you may be to a prospective employer.
The flip side of this, and this is aimed at managers, is that the more knowledgeable an employee, the more likely he or she is to leave the company, unless there’s an incentive for him or her to stay. Young, energetic employees in particular are likely to job hop, taking advantage of the aforementioned salary boost for new hires, unless your company is willing to put on the golden handcuffs. An excellent article on this can be found in the February 2005 issue of BusinessWeek, “It’s Time to Plug Talent Leaks,” by Jennifer Merritt and Louis Lavelle.
Just for the heck of it, we crunched a few numbers to see if there was any hint of ageism within our profession. This is hardly scientific, and we don’t claim to have looked at this from every angle, but here is what we found.
The first check was to compare wages for employees of different ages but the same years of experience and the same job title of “manager.” We found that younger employees earned less than their older colleagues with the same years of experience, with those less than 30 years old making about 20 percent less than those aged 60 and older. We suspect that even though the title and years of experience in this field are the same, older workers bring more work experience and knowledge to the game, and are thus perceived as being more valuable.
A more interesting finding was to compare younger vs. older employees in terms of hiring. What we were particularly interested in was the distribution of ages for those who had worked at a company for fewer than three years. The question in our mind was “Do companies hire younger people more readily than older people?” The table at the top of this page shows our findings. It does seem that a higher percentage of younger respondents were hired in the last three years than older respondents. While those under the age of 30 make up only 5 percent of the total number of respondents, they represent 11 percent of those hired in the last three years. As respondent age increased, the ratio of their representation in the “new hire” pool vs. their total representation decreased.
Quality Digest contacted 37,189 subscribers by e-mail and invited them to take the salary survey online. From those, we received about 2,200 responses. Weeding out invalid or incomplete responses, there were 2,155 valid submissions.
More than 83 percent of the respondents indicated that they were quality professionals, although we assume that 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 page 35 of the downloadable pdf.
Dirk Dusharme is Quality Digest’s editor in chief.
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