How to Assess Marketplace Base Pay and Ensure a Competitive Program

An old Sioux proverb states “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there”! In a similar sense, if your company doesn’t know what the marketplace is paying for jobs that your company employs, it won’t “know where it is” relative to that market. You may be paying your employees above, below or “competitively” with the marketplace. But how do you know?

So you bought a survey of market pay data for the analysis. Now what?

In this course we will analyze hypothetical pay survey data to determine a company’s relationship to the market. Pay surveys are the only true source of market place pay data for this process. Using a condensed, hypothetical, pay survey database, we will analyze pay data as a Compensation Analyst does. We will determine how a company’s pay rates are calculated and compared to the survey pay rates. We will also describe the importance of “Weighted Averages”, the debate about the use of Median data, and why companies should beware of the use of “on-line” pay data (free or not!).  

(Note: This process precedes the development of a pay structure (i.e. a set of pay ranges).