Wednesday, June 9, 2010

NACE Salary Calculator

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) has released salary calculators for both job seekers and employers. The employer version requires purchasing credits to get the salary data, but the one for job seekers is free.

And yes, it works for librarians.

To use it, you need to indicate the region where you are looking for work, the type of work you are looking for, the education that you possess and the amount of experience you have in the field. The calculator reports the amount of compensation you can expect to receive. If available, it also tells you how many salaries it used to come up with this figure.

For example, I tried Librarian in Flagstaff, Arizona and gave the minimum requirements of required degree and less than one year of experience. The response told me how many librarians were employed in the region (80), provided the starting salary $23,370 and suggested that a librarian with this level of experience was most likely to be offered a salary of $28,200. The calculator also reported that the salary information does not include any other compensation information, such as benefits.

This is a useful tool not only for recent graduates and current librarians but for our clients that are researching salary information to plan a move or to include this information on a cover letter.