Plant Services - May 2008 - (Page 57) WEB HUNTER Showing you the money Where to find detailed, specific salary information I t should be intuitively obvious that take-home pay is a measure of the value an employer puts on the work being done at this place and at this time. In the macro economy, it boils down to the balance between the number of people willing to do some job and the number of employers having a need for the skill level being offered. The balance can be fluid, changing from year to year. Every town once had several shoe repair shops. How many do you see now? Salary surveys are commonly used by both sides of the hiring table. Many times, though, someone ignores the caveats. The survey depends on statistics, which raises questions about the margin of error; population size, sample size and the number of respondents; and whether they were randomly or self-selected. In the latter case, there’s a tendency for only those making a good buck to respond; the others don’t want to admit they’re getting only chicken feed. The big picture A realistic pay rate is a function of geography, organizational size, your age, your sex as well as the gory details about the job itself. In the ideal world, we’d find a salary survey completed within the past month to better reflect the current economic realities. It would be based on a population of multiple thousands and use a truly random sample sufficient to guarantee a low margin of error. The respondents would be totally open, truthful people who perform exactly the same work that you’re performing. The questions asked would be of a sufficient quantity and quality to support a multiple regression analysis to yield a meaningful personalized comparison to the numbers printed on your pay stub. Because such ideality doesn’t exist, we’ve got to gather and digest as many inputs as possible. That’s why this month’s dive into the digital morass we call the Web is in search of practical, zero-cost, noncommercial, registration-free wage and salary resources that might come in handy one day. Remember, we search the Web so you don’t have to. May 2008 If you want a high-level view of the maintenance pay issue, you can take a look down on “Upward mobility,” a 900-word article by Bob Vavra, which is found at www.plantengineer ing.com/article/CA6519485.html. It offers an executive summary of the results garnered from 1,200 maintenance professionals who participated in a salary survey. Unfortunately, the information here isn’t granular enough to reveal how regional differences, job title and other relevant variables affect the reported pay scales. On the other hand, in 1996, Sandy Dunn, who lives in Como, Western Australia, got fed up with the lack of industrial maintenance resources he needed to improve things at the plant where he worked. So, in 1999, he launched his own online venture, the Plant Maintenance Resource Center, intending to aggregate links to the materials that plant maintenance professionals need to succeed. As you can imagine, the site has grown during the past nine years and, of course, he conducts a salary survey each year. It’s open to maintenance workers worldwide, but most of the participants come from the United States, a demographic factor that could suggest that the information presented reasonably reflects pay rates where you live. Freely available at www.plant-maintenance.com/survey.shtml, the results include the raw data and are sorted by industry, country, job function, educational level and work experience. You can open the files sequentially to identify trends to help get a better idea of where you stand in the economic arena. For the West Coast Those seeking employment need easy access to solid market intelligence about the job situation in the location where they’re searching. The logical place to get that localized intelligence is at the library, or so thought Mary-Ellen Mort, M.L.S., from the Bay Area Library and Information System. This thinking resulted in the online Job Star Central, where Mort is the project director. Although the site has its primary focus on jobs in the metro areas around San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego, you’ll find some content that applies to the rest of the country. Pay a visit to the Internet’s West Coast at http://jobstar.org/ index.php to explore the “Profession-Specific Salary 57 www.PLANTSERVICES.com http://www.plantengineering.com/article/CA6519485.html http://www.plantengineering.com/article/CA6519485.html http://www.plant-maintenance.com/survey.shtml http://jobstar.org/index.php http://jobstar.org/index.php http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com
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