2005-10-03

Salary Survey

CAD Salary Survey - Designers, Drafters, Engineers, Architects & Educators!
The AUGI Annual Salary Survey is now running!
The results will be published in the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of AUGIWorld magazine.
You do have to be a member to take the AUGI salary survey, but, it is a free membership and they don't sell your information to other parties. Don't forget to set your preferences in the My AUGI control panel, which determines whether you get hotnews and other AUGI updates via email.

The results of past Salary Surveys (among others) can be found on the Surveys Archive page. Please give your input in this anonymous survey, to give validity and ensure accuracy to our survey results.

I volunteer as the Survey Manager for AUGI, and I've held this position since this time last year. This announcement is not an official announcement of AUGI's, it's just something that I thought would benefit the user base from my perspective.
Last year I got quite a few questions about the survey and answered them as best I could, and I thought I'd share some of them here.

Privacy:
The survey results are not tied to your user name, and the results are not sold or given to any other entity, and results will only be given by wide groups and categories.

Currency:
The currency is in US dollars only for simplicity's sake. This year we have included a link to a site which will convert other currencies so non-US residents can easily participate.

What does Salary Include?:
This question came up a few times. The conclusion is that your salary should include your base pay plus bonuses, commissions, and overtime.

Salary Increase?:
Also, we have added the option of noting whether your salary has decreased (in previous surveys we only asked if it had increased or stayed the same).

Discipline:
We've tried to cover a wide-variety of disciplines, but, at the same time, we want to have meaningful results so don't want to get overly specific. The more respondents we have, the more we can break down the information in future surveys.

Job Title:
This one is a biggie! I know! that you do more than one job. You might do drafting, cad management, IT, training, etc, but, my assumption is that your pay is going to reflect your actual job title and how your company classifies that, not necessarily all of the additional things that you do, so, please just select the one job title that most closely matches your own.

Size of Company/Size of Department:
This got a few comments last year, when we asked how many employees does your company have? I'll admit I thought about it too. For instance, I work in a company of 20,000, but, there are less than 10 CAD users. So, this year, we have separate fields for size of company and size of department.

Please, pop up to the site and take 2 minutes to fill out this survey to make the information that AUGI provides to you more accurate and useful.

Browser: I have been told that Firefox and some other browsers don't work to take this survey. If you are using another program, please send your feedback to surveys@augi.com. I'd like to hear what you do use and whether or not this will actually affect your taking the survey.

Thank you!

2 comments:

RobiNZ said...

Not sure that converting foreign to US currency fairly represents the purchasing power of salaries outside the US. Perhaps you could adopt that international standard I've seen economists use and have a "Big Mac" factor:

Salary/Local cost of std "Big Mac"

Mistress of the Dorkness said...

Robin, ~nods~ I'll acknowledge that (currency conversions and all of the things that affect them just baffle me I'll admit).
hmm, had never heard of the Big Mac factor, lol, but, it certainly sounds promising. ;)
Made for some interesting reading, thank you!

http://stlouisfed.org/publications/re/2004/a/pages/international_econ.html
The ubiquity of McDonald’s around the world prompted The Economist in 1986 to begin an annual feature comparing prices of the Big Mac® sandwich in different countries as a tongue-in-cheek exercise explaining relative currency valuations. A similar index is published periodically by the financial firm UBS.
The underlying foundation of PPP is known as the "law of one price," which states that the price of a particular commodity—say, sesame seeds—should be equal in different countries after accounting for exchange rates between currencies. If sesame seeds were less expensive in one country than in another, an astute trader could buy sesame seeds in the low-price country and sell them in the higher-price country at a profit.