Job Search & Career Blog

What is your talent worth ?

January 19th, 2008

How do I find out who will pay most for my skills…? Demand and supply.

This is where skills pay off, and it’s important to know how and why this happens. An oil man in the US will get half of what an oil man in Nigeria will, because of distance, allowances, and in some cases negotiated terms of employment. A stock broker can ask for a salary and get it, based on skills and performance.

This applies naturally to professionals, but the applications are universal. If this sounds a little exotic to someone looking for a job in retail or a warehouse, it’s a bit closer to home than you might think. All forms of work have ‘bandwidths’ of pay, but some pay a lot more. It’s pretty easy to find out who’s paying what, too. Sometimes you’ll find you’re only a skill or so away from a much better job, or that you could be getting far better pay elsewhere.

How to find the best wages

• Check out the job ads in your sector. If you consistently find that you’re getting an average wage, have a look in the pay brackets above yours. Find out what sort of deals are being offered, and how to get there.
• Get advice. It’s easy to do, and you can get a few opinions, not just one, so you can see your options more clearly.
• If all you need to move up in the pay scale is some extra qualifications or experience, find out how to do that. This might look obvious, but a lot of people spend forever in jobs that go nowhere. That means, in effect, you go backwards.
• For professionals, you need to have a method of keeping track of career options, anyway. The professional groups are the most trustworthy sources, their websites and newsletters are primary sources.
• Employment agencies, at least the good ones, will be able to advise, and it’s in their interest to do so. They get paid relative to your salary, so they can do some of the work for you. They can also keep you clearly informed about what’s needed to achieve your goals.

Demand and supply in job search

Each sector has a level of demand for skills. In some cases, like medicine the demand for some skills is so high that you can name your own price. In others, like IT, competition is ferocious, and supply is increasing. In media, skills dictate, ultimately. Your product does the talking for you. In retail, administration, and other standardized jobs, demand fluctuates, but skill levels are rated on a series of known factors like qualifications and experience.

It’s necessary to know what the demand is in your area. To identify demand for your own skills, you need to follow pretty much the same procedures as for wages, but you also need to assess the levels of demand for particular skills.

How demand applies to your position:

• If base level jobs like basic IT/helpdesk skills are in demand, plenty of jobs, but wages are low, and it looks as if the work is either at or below your current skill levels, those jobs are an indication that there are better jobs above them. The demand is creating scope for higher level workers, too.
• If you see a lot of jobs in your sector with higher wages and a specific set of skills, that indicates a growth in demand. It may be your career path.
• If you see a lot of jobs at your level, very similar, it means there’s an over supply, and that getting work in the sector could become difficult. Start thinking, now, about what you want to do, because the over supply will start to reduce the value of the job.

Conditions in the industry. Easy to overlook, but most of the old “stable” jobs, like banks, government, and finance have been actually employing fewer people while doing much more. Demand has been shrinking, drastically, in real terms. These are the classic examples of when to start risk assessments in your career, too.

Points 3 and 4 are very much “look out” scenarios. Supply is a true indicator of where your job is going, or in some cases, not going.

Like accountancy: There’s always jobs for accountants, but base level accountancy jobs have been effectively losing ground since the higher qualifications started to eat away the top jobs. Law has suffered badly from oversupply, graduates have to find their way to a career.

It’s extremely important that you look ahead when assessing demand for your skills. Even in retail, the signs are emerging that between new shopping methods and new warehousing techniques, shrinkage is inevitable. Demand will change with the new methods.

Demand and wages are good measures of where your skills can take you.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under Job Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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