Lady Luck smiles on the salary jackpot

Medical Laboratory Observer, March, 2007 by Allison Long

Somewhere, somehow, someone is winning a jackpot. Powerball, lotteries, scratch tickets, Bingo, online poker, and back-hall pool offer plenty of chances to pick up big-time cash. But who is winning the laboratory salary jackpot? While a relentless quest for scientific winnings characterizes the clinical laboratory professional, MLO wanted to know what kind employment-compensation gambles its readers might have experienced this past year. A total of 1,873 responded to our annual salary survey. Keep your fingers crossed while we present the results.

According to MLO's survey respondents, the representative lab professional that responded to the survey is a female (69%), 49.57 years of age, working in an urban area (41%) in Texas (7%), California (6%), Ohio (5%), New York (5%), or Illinois (5%). She has a supervisory position as a lab manager/supervisor (29%) or as a section lab manager (21%) in a hospital lab (67%), and she generally works an eight-hour shift (68%). Her salary is $70,000 compared to the median yearly salary for a medical technologist at $49,250.

Our representative clinical laboratorian works for an organization with either one to 10 employees (25%), where the annual test volume is more than 1,000,000 (28%). She is a graduate of a college or university (58%) and is certified in her field (95%). She takes more than 10 CE classes yearly (33%). She has worked in the clinical laboratory field for more than 20 years (71%) and has been with her current employer for her entire career (34%).

There are wide variations among salary jackpots. No doubt some of the salary differences relate to competency level, business conditions, or personality factors, and it is not possible to evaluate these from responses to a questionnaire. Several easily defined factors, however, seem to contribute to different pay structures. These include education, geographic location, job function, and the length of time a person has been in the clinical laboratory profession.

Jackpot differentiators

* Education

Generally, education is a significant differentiator in the salary structure. The typical employee with a high school diploma makes about $22,000 less than one with a post-graduate college degree (see Figure 1). Even the employee with a bachelor's degree is likely to experience a $13,000 shortfall as compared to her post-graduate counterpart. The range between a pathologist and a medical technologist was $140,750. (see Figure 3)

* Geographic area

Those in the Pacific, Central, and Northeast regions get the highest median salaries ($83,000, $81,600, and $70,000, respectively), while the ones in the Mountain ($68,000) and Southeast ($62,000) areas of the United States do not fluctuate much (see Figure 2).

* Job function

Understandably, a person's primary job function is a significant salary differentiator. As physicians, pathologists are the leading contenders, with a median salary of $190,000 (see Figure 3). They are followed by lab directors and managers/administrators at average yearly salaries of $85,000 and $70,000 respectively. Lady Luck smiled on medical technologists whose median salary was $49,250 annually.

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* Years in the industry

In general, our clinical laboratorian's salary increases the longer she stays in the professional field.

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The winning ticket

Our average clinical laboratorian says her employer offers some substantial benefits when it comes to passing out some winning numbers. As part of her contract, healthcare insurance (98%), dental coverage (91%), life insurance (87%), 401(k) (86%), disability insurance (78%), and bonuses (22%) were part of her 2006 annual compensation package. She expects a salary increase of 2% to 4% (68%) this year, and believes that her job--with which she is somewhat satisfied (50%)--is also somewhat (43%) or very secure (42%) (see Figure 4).

Finally, the typical clinical laboratorian has experienced a moderate impact on her laboratory due to the shortage of medical personnel (45%), which has so far not made it necessary to outsource (86%). [Of labs who did outsource tests, 45% were outsourcing between 1% and 10%.] Her lab, however, did automate and/or further automate procedures last year (58%), and intends to continue automating in the coming year (61%).

The best prize of all

Accolades go to the healthcare specialists in labs throughout our country whose dedication to the medical laboratory profession brings a resounding "job well done" from patients and other medical professionals. MLO salutes you!

* The anomalies of lab professionals with bachelor's degrees receiving lower pay than those with technical school degrees (see Figure 1), and professionals with three to five years and 10 to 14 years of experience receiving lower pay than those with less experience (Figure 4) might be influenced by a combination of the survey respondents' job functions and regions of residence, as well as other factors that cannot be measured here.