Do you make enough money? A quick tour of the SLA Salary Survey

Information Outlook, March, 2005 by Cybele Elaine Werts

A few years ago, I worked as a technical writer for a big computer company. I never thought all that much about whether I made more or less than the other employees--mostly software engineers--but assumed I was on par, if only because I had a master's degree and most of them didn't. One day I was updating a spreadsheet that listed all the employees and how many "credits" each had, which was the company's method of disguising how much we earned. It was pretty easy to figure out the relationship between the so-called credits and my actual salary, and I discovered to my horror that I was the lowest paid of some 40 people on the team. Not low, not medium low, but the bottom of the barrel. As you can imagine, I became wholly distracted from my work for some time. Knowing that I was pretty much slime--at least financially speaking--totally blew my image of myself as a white-collar professional. Maybe I would have been happier being ignorant.

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I've always had a deep-seated obsession with knowing how much people earn, and yet I simultaneously keep mum about my own cash flow. Some people spill their finances willy-nilly, which I consider a reflection of bad personal boundaries. I've also found that people who earn less than I do (which is just about everyone here in salary-poor Vermont) become uncomfortable if they know that number.

Reading the SLA Annual Salary Survey for 2004 fed my curiosity, because I got to know everyone else's salary. The good news is that this time my salary is not floating among the muck ... and what a relief that was! My compliments to John Latham, director of information for SLA and editor of this excellent publication. The report is clearly written, includes a solid amount of detail, and covers all the areas on which I would want data.

While my current yearly earnings are quite a bit under the New England median of $64,000, there is hope, because this average is just a beat off from the $64,082 that Pacific Coast information specialists earn, making us the two highest, paid geographical areas (p. 56). In fact, information specialists in most of the country earn less than I do, starting at a low of $46,625 in the East South Central area of the United States, which includes Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. My sister information specialist Melissa works in Alabama, so I wonder how she feels about this.

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Where Do You Fit?

I also earn less than the $60,000 median for people with a master's degree, but this may be because my graduate work was in educational technology, not in library science (p. 59). Considering that I am just about two years into this career, officially speaking, I am earning more than the median for two or less years of experience ($40,000) or three to five years ($47,000), which indicates that I'm either lucky or possibly just brilliant at my job (p. 59). Finally, I find that I'm in the ballpark for a workplace with 500 to 999 employees that is nonprofit, academic, and a federally funded (in part) institution (pp. 61 and 62). Could be a lot worse.

Sadly, I make less than either women ($57,300) or men ($63,000) as a whole, and I am horrified that there continues to be such a gap between women's and men's salaries for the same job (p. 60). Looking at the salary distribution by ethnicity/race chart on page 60, I notice that minorities of all types are still woefully underrepresented in the profession. While salaries for all ethnicities tend to land near $60,000, Native Americans/Alaskans are at the peak, earning a median of $65,000, while Hispanics are at the bottom, at just under $50,000. However, these averages have less meaning when you see that only 25 Native American/Alaskans and 44 Hispanics were represented.

Whites are by far the majority with 2,088 out of 2,320 total respondents. I mentioned this in my discussion with Daphne, an information specialist in the Pacific region, the area with the highest average salary. She replied, "What activities are the national associations taking on to increase minority representation in the profession?" Good question, Daphne, and one that SLA addresses in the sidebar to this article.

Geography and other factors provide a context. You might ask, "How much am I earning compared with other jobs where I live?" or "Am I being paid on a local or a national scale?" I'm in an unusual situation, because I work for a relatively small company in Vermont, but it is part of a fairly large national company.

We are paid on a national scale, which means I'm earning a heck of a lot more than I'd ever earn at most other Vermont jobs. In fact, I looked for a new job a few years ago when our federal funding was winding up. Every single local employer paid $10,000 less than I was then earning! On the other hand, considering that I am being paid on this national scale, you might think I'd be earning something closer to the average for New England, but not so. Still, I'm an optimist, and I have a job I love with top-notch benefits, so no complaints from this peanut gallery.