April 2018
Check Out the LinkedIn Salary Feature
LinkedIn rolled out a new salary feature in the fall of 2016. The feature started in the US, UK, and Canada with plans to expand it globally. You can access it here.
It’s taking some time to gain traction, but it has the potential to become very powerful when more LinkedIn users provide their own real-time salary data. If you give the system your salary (with assurances it will not be displayed on your profile and will remain private), they offer you access to these insights for free for one year. If you are a premium member, you will have access to this data without having to share your salary. The system asks for your location, title and years of experience in order to place the data in context. Consider adding your salary information to make the system better.
I provided my salary information and tried a search. I looked up Career Consultant in Annapolis. Likely there was not enough data for that city and title, so the results displayed were broad (in fairness this happens on other salary sites too). The result shown in annual terms for a Career Consultant in the US was a range of $32,000 – $74,000. That’s a big range but I have found that $55,000 is about average for this title in the Washington DC area, so it wasn’t far off the mark. Check out the data for your profession and see what you find.
In order to negotiate effectively, you must know the market rate for your type of work and location. There are many other sites that have better salary information at the moment (such as www.payscale.com), but over time LinkedIn should become more powerful and accurate. Give it a try now and see what you find. Then revisit it in the future to see how the quality of the data has evolved.
