The Surprising Salary Comparisons

SALARY SURVEY EXERCISE
The use of professionally developed compensation surveys is recommended for conducting market
pricing in job evaluation. However, it is important to be able to interpret and use these surveys correctly.
This exercise requires you to interpret data from a typical, professionally developed survey. The survey
included in this exercise is for a number of information systems positions in for-profit organizations in
the Southeast U.S.
With reference to the compensation survey attached, answer the following questions:
1. What is the number of fully-competent system analyst positions included in the survey?
2. What is the median salary for a fully-competent systems analyst?
3. What is the average annual bonus for a fully-competent systems analyst?
4. How many organizations surveyed actually paid an annual bonus to entry-level applications
programmers?
5. What % of entry-level application programmers received an annual bonus?
6. For entry-level applications programmers, what is the average bonus amount as a % of salary?
7. Without going into detail, from the data provided, how does it appear that companies are doing
in keeping the compa-ratio for salary grades around 1.0? [Note: Compare weighted average
salaries to salary grade midpoints.]
8. If I were an HR manager for a not-for-profit organization in the Northeast, what concerns might I
have about using the data in this survey? What additional information about the survey would
you like to have that is not indicated in this exercise?
9. If this survey was conducted in December 2012 and published in June 2013, what adjustments
would I have to make in the data to establish salary grades for 2014, assuming I wanted to
employ a “lead the market” strategy? Be specific!
10. Why should I pay for this type of survey data when I can get similar data for free on the Internet?
Use the form on the following page to submit your responses. Each question is worth 10 points.