A while ago, a Sales Director asked for “an average salary for a sales/account manager in IT company selling specialty software within Europe”. I wish it were that simple but there is no such thing as a “salary in Europe”. For the same job, each country will pay different salaries. Salaries are normally always expressed…
The safeguards in salary benchmarking
December 20, 2011 by 3 Comments
Here is a paraphrase of a LinkedIn question asked recently : “How do you make sure each role benchmarked for salary purposes has the same responsibility ? Is there legislation on this ?” This is a question a Compensation specialist often gets from managers. Here is what you can reply when you get that question…
How to compare average and median salary information
December 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment
I recently described how to calculate a percentile. Today I will clarify the difference between the average and the median. Technically, the average is the sum of all data points, divided by the number of data points. The median is the 50th percentile, or the value that splits the data points in two equal groups…
From job evaluation to salary scales – the basics
November 22, 2011 by 5 Comments
One of my readers Naim asked me about how job grading and salary scales / salary ranges are linked so I will cover the steps leading to the design of the salary structure in an organisation. “Banding” or “job grading” is done in order to enable comparison of roles across departments and functions within and…
How to use vlookup in Excel
November 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment
In today’s Sunday Skills I will cover one of the most useful functions in Excel for the Compensation Manager. Vlookup is like an advanced copy/paste function, which automatically copies for you only the information for data which is present in both files (the main file and the source file). For example, imagine you are participating…
What is your approach to aging ?
November 1, 2011 by 5 Comments
… I’m referring to aging salary survey data, of course 🙂 The big compensation providers are starting to return the results of their 2011 surveys, and now is the time to get started on the analysis of the data. So, a few months ago, you participated to the survey. The data you submitted was dated…
How to use Concatenate in Excel
October 2, 2011 by 2 Comments
In the previous instalment of Sunday Skills, I shared how to use Text to Columns in order to “split” columns of information. Today, let me demonstrate the “opposite”, using the Concatenate function in order to “merge” multiple cells, with text and/or numbers, into a single cell. This will be useful if you have a first…
