Honoring Equal Pay Day; LinkedIn Salary Feature; and Salary Negotiation Advice – April 2018

Brand Career Management Monthly Tip Sheet

One way to tackle this issue is to encourage women to negotiate more often when they receive a job offer. To that end, I presented a webinar in March on salary negotiation to the National Association of Social Workers and in April, I am speaking at two conferences. Both workshops are aimed at helping career professionals encourage their clients to negotiate. I also wrote a post with some tips for salary negotiation on March 20.

On another note tied to empowering women, I’m happy to report that the career conversation series in March designed to strengthen confidence in women went very well. I co-hosted all three with my esteemed colleague Ruth Winden from the UK and we got great feedback. You can access the recordings on my homepage paulabrand.com (the third discussion was about salary negotiation).

Warmest regards,
Paula

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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.

The posts and videos shared below give insight into the issue of pay gaps in the US, advice for salary negotiations and some ways to address gender equity.

As a starting point, Payscale.com gives very detailed and helpful information about the pay gap between men and women in the US. It explains the difference between the uncontrolled gap (which suggests that women earn 76 cents for every dollar earned by men) and the controlled gap (which suggests that women make 98 cents for every dollar).

For further data, this 2016 article by Eileen Patten of Pew Research shares an overwhelming amount of statistics while giving a glimpse of recent comparisons of pay data for women and men broken down by race.

On a different note, the following two Forbes articles shed light on different aspects of gender parity.

• Kathy Caprino, a career coach who I admire, interviewed Stacey Engle, Executive Vice President of Fierce Conversations to share insights on what needs to change for women to address gender equity.
• Next, Emilie Aries of Forbes shares advice on mistakes to avoid when negotiating salary.

And as previously mentioned, I recently wrote a blog post with some additional tips for salary negotiation.

Finally, this 2 ½ minute video by www.finansforbundet.dk provides a unique way to illustrate the unfairness of unequal pay for the same job.

I will speak on Helping Women Earn What They’re Worth: Being Informed, Prepared and Courageous for Salary Negotiations at the Maryland Career Development Association Annual Conference on April 13 at the Doubletree in Columbia, Maryland. This is a great conference, and you can save on registration now through April 6.

On April 20, I will present Helping Clients Earn What They Are Worth Through Salary Negotiation Tactics for the Raising the Bar Conference at Turf Valley in Ellicott City. This is a great event for professionals in the workforce development field in Maryland.

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