Ann Bares recently posted a blog on market pricing social media jobs. She really hit the nail on the head by using a very timely and relevant example many of us in the compensation profession are wrestling with right now. Today it is social media jobs, a few years ago it was web development, and tomorrow it will be some other emerging field. We need practical guidance for market pricing emerging job families
I don’t disagree with Ann’s advice at all, but rather wanted to add some additional perspective.
Understand the Labor Market: Know where people come from and/or go to when trying to fill those emerging job families. The social media job family that Ann has queued up is a fantastic example because five years ago, these jobs didn’t even exist. Think about it…no kid was playing in the sandbox twenty years ago saying, “When I grow up, I want to be a Community Moderator.” Yet today, there are thousands of people making a living by doing just that.
So, where did they come from?
Clearly, there’s no single answer, but when I look at the survey job summaries, the Monster job postings or the LinkedIn profiles of people doing this type of work, I see threads of both journalism and marketing. This prompts me to study the market data for those job families as well. Granted, this is not your typical “70% of job duties” type of job match for the social media jobs, but it does provide some insight on the wages paid to people in a nearby talent pool. If the tasks and qualifications are reasonably similar, the market data for these adjacent, but more established, job families will tend to track with the emerging field.