MRO salaries 2007

Here it is, our annual report of who’s earning what in industrial maintenance, and where.

“So the question you’ve gotta ask yourself is, ‘Do I feel lucky?’ ”
         — Dirty Harry

OK, so we’re all overworked and underpaid, right? But what exactly is “underpaid?” Is it truly a subjective thing or are we maybe, just maybe, not quite as monetarily underappreciated as we like to think we are? Where are the benchmarks? Right here, boys and girls, right here.

The Compdata Surveys division of Dolan Technologies Corp. has once again given us a peek at the results of its exhaustive survey of American workers. How exhaustive?

 For this year’s survey, Compdata polled 2,370 United States manufacturers, which employ more than 885,000 workers. The entire survey encompasses benefits and pay practices for 539 job titles with local, statewide and regional breakouts.

A few tidbits you won’t see in these numbers relate to the employment outlook. For example, the survey reveals that competition for top performers is heating up, with 96.1 percent of organizations actively recruiting. To attract and keep top performers, monetary incentives continue to be used in a variety of different forms. Sign-on bonuses are utilized by 31.5 percent of organizations. Another tactic for recruiting top employees is to offer increased starting rates. This is used by 24 percent of companies, and 13.5 percent offer more raises during the first year.

Preliminary pay increase budgets were reported at 3.65 percent for 2007 and — more importantly — are projected to be 3.63 percent in 2008.

Now — are you ready? — here are the numbers.

Information for this story was culled from the Compensation Data 2007 survey produced by Compdata Surveys. For more details, visit the Web site www.compdatasurveys.com.

This article appeared in the October/November 2007 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2007.

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