The business case for pay grades over individual ranges is clear.
Switching to pay grades reduces administrative burden, facilitates internal
alignment and makes it easier to set salaries for jobs that lack market
benchmarks. PayScale’s new eBook “Bring Back the Sizzle:
PayScale’s Guide to Comp Plans That Get Workers Fired Up (in a good way),” clearly lays out the process for
creating ranges. Be sure to read it!
The hottest jobs, though, fall over the top of your pay ranges for
similar jobs. Because of their higher-than-average demand, they command higher
prices than similar jobs. Rather than lose valuable candidates and employees to
your competitors, you need to accommodate those range outliers in one of two
ways.
Create an individual
pay range: Though pay grades are
usually preferred, if you have multiple hot jobs, you may need to assign
individual pay ranges to those positions.
Pay a market premium: In cases where only
one or two positions are hot jobs, think about paying a market premium. If you
do pay a premium, make sure that employees understand they are getting a
premium. Should the demand shift and your company decide to remove the premium,
the affected employees will understand the rationale.
The Hottest of the Hot: The chart below
reveals the top ten hottest jobs, based on projected future growth and median
pay. Does your company employ any of these job roles? Read also about the
hottest new jobs in this blog article.
| Job Title | Relative Experienced Median Pay | 2010-2020 Projected Growth |
| 1. Biomedical Engineer | $79,500 | 61.70% |
| 2. Nurse Home Care | $61,000 | 70.50% |
| 3. Marketing Consultant | $92,100 | 41.20% |
| 4. Actuary | $136,000 | 26.70% |
| 5. Clinical Research Associate (CRA) | $90,700 | 36.40% |
| 6. Software Architect | $119,000 | 24.60% |
| 7. Financial Advisor | $90,200 | 32.10% |
| 8. Certified Financial Planner (CFP) | $89,500 | 32.10% |
| 9. Security Consultant, (IT) | $102,000 | 27.80% |
| 10. Petroleum Engineer | $162,000 | 17.00% |
PayScale
Data and Methodology behind this:
2010-2020
Projected Growth:
This is the forecasted growth from The Bureau of Labor Statistics for the job’s
overall job family for the period from 2010-2020.
Relative
Experienced Median Pay: The median of Total Cash Compensation for the
specific job title based upon how many years experience most people in the sample
for the occupation tend to have.
Total
Cash Compensation (TCC): TCC combines base annual salary or hourly wage,
bonuses, profit sharing, tips, commissions, and other forms of cash earnings,
as applicable. It does not include equity (stock) compensation, cash value of
retirement benefits, or value of other non-cash benefits (e.g.,
healthcare).
Notes:
When creating a score for each of the factors
involved we take the factor in hand and divide it by the average of all jobs.
The final score is then determined by multiplying all the scores together and
listing them from largest to smallest.