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LinkedIn, Glassdoor Add Tools To Reveal Your Pay Potential (seattletimes.com)
Money isn't everything, but it counts for a lot at work. That's why work-related websites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor are adding new online tools to help professionals understand their salary potential (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source.) From a report on the Seattle Times: LinkedIn, which calls itself the social network for professionals, is adding a service that provides members with pay information for a variety of jobs, including a break-down by such factors as location, industry, education and experience. It's based on anonymized data submitted by LinkedIn members, including details about base pay and other compensation, such as bonuses and stock grants. The new service comes two weeks after Glassdoor, a competing online job site, introduced a feature that promises to help workers determine their "personal market value" by comparing their current job title, salary and related information with data from other workers and current hiring trends. Glassdoor's site already showed information about median salaries and perks, along with employees' reviews of what it's like to work at various companies. It says the new feature can be useful for job-seekers as well as workers who might want to negotiate a raise from their current employer.
I wish you were right , but see Equifax Workforce Solutions
I tried this feature out on Glassdoor, and have used others in the past, offered by various tech publications. (I believe it was InfoWorld who did one once, some years back?)
The problem I've always run into is that you often can't accurately determine what a person *really* does by job title, because employers get creative with titles in an effort to discourage this type of "salary shopping".
For example, many years ago, I was given a title of "PC Support Specialist" when everyone else I knew doing anything similar to me had a title of "Systems Administrator" or "Network Administrator", or even "Tier 3/4 Help Desk". It wasn't really appropriate for the place to have given me some kind of "tiered" help desk title because technically, we didn't HAVE a help desk. We just had an "all purpose" I.T. department that wore multiple hats, generally doing in person support for anyone in the office needing it. (Back then, remote workers were few and far between. We had dial in modem support for remote access services, but it was so slow and painful to use, people didn't do a whole lot with it.) But the fact was, the people I knew doing the same or LESS work than I did often had a title with "Administrator" in it, guaranteeing tens of thousands per year higher salaries than I got.
And in another previous job position, I was given a title of "Network Manager". It sounds relatively impressive since it has "Manager" in the title -- but think about that one for a minute. Does that title make ANY sense? Managers are hired to manage people, not things. In fact, I was the only full-time I.T. person in that company, and the only managing I *really* did was having permission to call in an outside computer service when I deemed it necessary for a project too large to handle by myself in a timely manner. Then I essentially managed the outside guy, paid hourly for his services.
I don't mean to sound all "sour grapes" about this.... I worked in both of those positions for years, each and liked a lot of things about them. (I had some great co-workers and in one of the two, reported directly to the company's owner who was a really great guy.) Salary isn't everything. But I'm just trying to point out that it's been my experience in I.T. over the years that the relatively "oddball" titles often signify a person who is put in charge of all sorts of things in a company's computer infrastructure and may have a breath of experience far more vast than others, yet puts them at a disadvantage if they try to apply for those better-paying jobs where they're looking for a hire to fill one of the more "well known job titles".