Assessor Series FAQ #6
|
|
Top Previous Next |
|
QUESTION: What salary surveys are used by ERI? Is there a way to find out which surveys are providing the data for a specific position in a specific geographic location? Are there lists of employers surveyed or estimates of the non-redundant number of individual incumbents surveyed from the most current surveys?
Links that supply those answers in detail include these free sites as well as others limited to ERI subscribers:
www.erieri.com - Other Survey Sources www.eri-salary-survey.com - Survey Finder http://salary-surveys.erieri.com - Search Surveys by Job Title http://salary-surveys.erieri.com - Search Area Employers
ERI collects available salary survey data for jobs and areas; evaluates each survey for validity, reliability and use; and compiles mean and median salaries for positions with similar duties, responsibilities, skills and functions. Under "View" on the top bar of any Assessor Series product, a list of wage/salary survey titles and publishers which may be of interest to subscribers is shown.
ERI does not necessarily endorse or recommend the surveys listed, nor are all of those shown necessarily currently published or used in ERI's analyses and structures. "Available Survey Sources" are included for the benefit of readers who may wish to supplement their current survey libraries with data appropriate to specific applications. Confidential survey data is not included in ERI consensus analyses unless permission is granted by the publisher. Requests for information regarding individual surveys are referred directly to individual publishers (by active links in that View screen to the survey providers' Internet URL home pages).
Each Assessor Survey Listing referral screen is a bit different. The Geographic Assessor illustrates surveys specific to a state, territory or region, the Salary Assessor lists surveys where either presently or in the past this specific job was referenced. A list of available pay surveys may also be viewed from ERI's Platform Library®. (See Salary Surveys for instructions.) ERI does not, however, provide our subscribers with an exact list of those surveys used in any one Assessor Series because the data and surveys utilized changes from quarter to quarter (with rotation of older and newer surveys in and out of the analysis) and because even a list that tied a particular position or area or industry to a list of surveys would not convey the weighting given by our analysts for individual position data, survey reliability, incumbents, industry weighting, etc.
Most individual surveys report participants, but do not tie specific data to those participants. All compensation research firms, including ERI, wish to safeguard the privacy of individual survey participants. In general, ERI does not confirm whether a specific employer's data is included in any particular Assessor Series application analysis, that is, unless the employer has publicly released this information. Survey participants are displayed on the Base Salary Graph as light green dots over the data plots described above. If you put your cursor over a survey participant dot, then the source data will display. Participation may have been via ERI's patented on-line survey, ERI Salary Surveys (old-fashion paper/pencil surveys in which you can display participants and search* by employer, employee, and location), PAQ field job analyses, PAQ's eDOT Skills & Competency (SCO) Project, Occupational Assessor's cybernetic selected characteristics of occupations contribution to the latter, digitized optical character recognition reading of 850,000 US organizations' IRS public documents, digitized reading of US SEC proxies, 10-Ks, and 8-Ks, manual digitization of public UK/Euro countries' companies' annual reports, Canadian SEDAR data (under license), and/or other data licensed for use in the Assessor Series from organizations such as GuideStar, Statistics Canada, national statistics offices of other countries, and others. All of these sources comply with US DOJ/FTC Antitrust Safety Zone Statements by meeting the following conditions: 1) provider participation in surveys is managed by a third-party; 2) the information provided by survey participants is data more than three months old; and 3) there are at least five providers reporting data upon which each disseminated statistic is based, no individual provider's data represents more than 25 percent on a weighted basis of that statistic, and any information disseminated is sufficiently aggregated such that it would not allow recipients to identify the prices charged or compensation paid by any particular provider (unless part of the public record).
We also provide total population statistics that will help subscribers to evaluate whether an adequate population of incumbent employees within the area for which employers are competing for talent has been surveyed. In this regard, ERI is peerless. We know that our combination of multiple survey data means that we are analyzing the largest populations possible, in most cases much more than 30% of the employers in a given area. There are currently over 46 million US and Canadian employees included in ERI's Salary Assessor database. Since we have analyzed so many sources in order to report updated consensus results, we expect our pay data to be more representative of market norms than any one specific published survey, particularly if it relies on a smaller sample (e.g., SEC proxies alone) or is out of date (e.g., the BLS OES surveys used for our standard Reliability Statistics). According to the statistical laws of large numbers, Central Tendency and Bernoulli’s Law, Assessors that aggregate multiple overlapping sources covering virtually entire populations will be more accurate in normative terms than any one survey of a more limited sample.
Survey population statistics may be reviewed by selecting View | Employee Populations (in the Salary Assessor) or View | Survey Populations (in the Executive Compensation Assessor).
The accuracy derived from those samples freshly surveyed in each database is further revealed in the View | Reliability Statistics which discloses the standard error of the largest single component of our multiple survey sources. In most Assessors, that will show for each total compensation number the total number of people holding that job (i.e., the number of observations) in that area and the minimum reliability statistics for each measure.
Confidential survey data is not included in ERI consensus analyses, unless permission is granted by the publisher. Requests for information on individual surveys are referred directly to individual publishers. Certain long-time Assessor Series jobs appear to be disappearing from survey reporting. Some 1980's jobs (such as Rotogravure Press Operator) have indeed disappeared, but a more likely explanation is that “salary surveys are disappearing.” Picture a survey operation where $80 of every $100 is for covered fixed costs while $10 exists for marketing and $10 for profit. The US government dealt these private surveys a terrible blow when, in 1995 and 1996, they altered their OES employment survey to include wages (for immigration prevailing rate purposes). ERI saw an immediate cessation of many local and regional surveys (from Scottsbluff to Bellingham); eliminating 20% of a survey's subscribers eliminated the profit and sales funding. What's more, the introduction of “free salary” data via the Internet in the 2000s did not help. Both well-intended sources like SalaryExpert.com (which reports conservative values based on the US and other government OES or OES-like surveys) or those other sites that exist to attract job search candidates (typically showing high values) have had a similar negative effect on private and local surveys. And government regulation has perhaps taken the largest toll.
In the US, the September 15, 1993 Federal Trade Commission's safety zone directive that “a survey must be managed by a legitimate third-party; the data provided must be more than three months old; and at least five organizations must report the data on which each statistic is based. No one data source can represent more than 25 percent of the statistic, etc.” has had a chilling effect on salary survey firms that now know they can easily be part of anti-trust litigation (frivolous suits still require a defense; defend ten cases and win them all and a small firm will still be bankrupt).
For more information on the process of including a job in the Assessor Series, please see ERI Employer-Provided Data Sources.
*For details of specific surveys containing a particular job title, see Find Your Survey Match by Job Title or do a Survey Search. |