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QUESTION:  How does ERI reconcile weighted average and median pay data with position years of experience ranges when some salary surveys do not report years of experience?

 

While it is true that some salary surveys do not report years of experience in their summary results, many do report mid-values such as weighted average, straight average and median in addition to minimum and maximum range data or quartiles. ERI collects, compiles and analyzes every available wage and salary survey available to our library.  The basic steps for assigning weighted average and median values to maturity curves are outlined here.  ERI's methodology is a multi-stepped process and is briefly outlined as follows:

 

Step 1:  ERI collects, compiles and analyzes survey results and calculates the weighted average salary for all employees in that given position.

 

Step 2:  ERI assigns a "years of experience value" to the "weighted average value."  The number of years of experience assigned to the weighted average is based on cross referencing salary surveys that do link pay to experience, other published sources for maturity curves, maturity studies conducted by ERI, US Census data (which reports the average years experience for jobs), etc.  A unique job life length (for instance, eight years or thirty years) is assigned to each position.

 

Jobs with a typically short years experience range naturally reach their weighted average within a few years. It should be noted that the years experience is intended to be for the "career in that job title," rather than for the number of years that an employee has been at a single company.  It is assumed that companies pay experienced increment adjusted wages to more qualified candidates and that entry level wages reported in salary surveys refer to entry level pay for new hires with minimal experience. Surveys which may not be reporting such entry level wages are easily identified when compared within the larger consensus database.

 

Step 3:  The ERI weighted average, the ERI entry level pay and the ERI level maximum pay are then pegged to the midpoint of each position's range, year one, and maximum years experience for each job, respectively (such as 1, 4.5, and 8 or 1, 15.5 and 30), so that there are three "known" levels of experience.

 

Step 4:  ERI's program reports the pay for years experience according to the unique statistical pattern for each job (most graphs of this type of analysis are not symmetrical bell-shaped curves, but rather, skewed distributions).