Should You Talk Salary With Your Peers?
Recently on Good Morning America, the CEO of a career website was discussing the use of salary data to help careers through salary negotiation.
Essentially the positioning of the segment was that sharing salary information among colleagues was seen as "office gossip", thus discouraging the practice. Knowing what your peers earn is a fundamental way to ensure "equal pay for equal work". If that's now seen as un-American then so is feminism.
Diane Sawyer is one of the best in the business, but that piece took the perspective that an employer wants to portray. Employers want you to think:
- Salary websites are merely gossip sites that have invalid information
- Using information from the internet doesn't take performance into account so it can't be used for negotiation purposes
- Having conversations regarding salary among peers is akin to corporate espionage--or worse, the equivalent of The Enquirer.
At Springraise, it's our belief that this attitude stunts career progression and compensation. Having an open dialog about compensation among peers is a good thing and can lead to higher motivation and healthy competition among peers. Sure, bitterness could result if one person resents being paid less than another, but that's not the peer's fault. It's the fault of the hiring manager and the company guidelines.
Each of us has to measure success in ways we feel comfortable. Blatantly discouraging discussions about how compensation and performance are correlated, however, is nothing more than self-serving to the employer. It is our policy at Springraise for all employees to know exactly how others are compensated. We live what we profess.
Salary and Bachelor’s Degree
I always wonder about articles like this one from the Wall Street Journal's Career Journal section entitled, The Declining Value of Your College Degree. What are they trying to say? That your college degree isn't worth getting anymore? Don't worry, just get your high school diploma, right?
Here's the reality that is buried deep down in the piece:
To be sure, the average American with a college diploma still earns about 75% more than a worker with a high-school diploma and is less likely to be unemployed.
The reason I think these articles are written is because they are controversial. It's almost always a ploy to get people to read more rather than a true treatise on the state of compensation. The anecdotal stories don't necessarily roll up into the experience of everyone.
Springraise is built to answer many of these questions. This is precisely why we collect the education and compensation information that we do. As we scale to collect millions of profiles, we'll be able to tell you the value of a bachelor's degree, but YOUR bachelor's degree. We'll tell you how much a BA degree from the University of Michigan is worth versus one from Harvard. We'll tell you how much a person who works in pharma sales should make with a particular background.
The great news? You have the power to make this all possible. Just add your profile to Springraise and immediately you can see how your career progression stacks up to others with our background. The more people we have, the better the data. It's in your hands.
And by the way, if you are in college right now and read that article, think twice before dropping out.