$2,700 A Week? Yes, This Could Be What You Find in Your Paycheck
A barely six-figure salary is enough for some people. But others want more -- much more. And those high-dollar-minded people would do well to look for their next job in just three industries -- tech, consulting and law. That’s what a new report by Glassdoor found by evaluating salary and compensation information shared by employees over the past year on the employment site.
The report went further, identifying America’s 15 Highest Paying Companies, each providing median annual total compensation to new hires of more than $140,000. That includes account base salary, bonuses of cash and stock, commissions and other financial income.
Interestingly, nine of the fifteen are tech-sector employers including Netflix and Google. Another four are consulting firms like McKinsey and Booz Allen. Two are law firms, including top-paying Skadden Arps, which hands out median compensation of $182,000 to new employees.
Glassdoor Chief Economist Andrew Chamberlain says technology firms dominate the rankings because of the sector’s rapid growth in the 21st Century. “If we had done this list in the 1950s, there would have been automakers on this list,” he says. “In the 1970s, you would have seen aircraft manufacturing on this list.”
Legal and consulting firms show up on the top-payer list, because these industries need highly skilled experts. Chamberlain said one of the most useful takeaways is that all of the best-paying employers are in the service sector. “In service industries, jobs are hard to automate,” he said. “They require judgments and specialized skills. Those are the things that are leading to these very high salaries.”
The top-pay report includes no financial services firm. Andrew Chamberlain acknowledges that seems odd given the fame -- or infamy -- Wall Street has for handing out multi-million-dollar bonuses on top of multi-million-dollar salaries to top executives. The explanation is that Glassdoor examined median salary levels rather than averages.
A handful of investment bank senior executives who got tens of millions of dollars in compensation would skew averages, Chamberlain said. While financial services pays extremely well at the upper levels, he noted, it’s average at best for junior employees. Median salaries are those with an equal number of pay positions above and below them, and Chamberlain says that more accurately reflects what a typical employee could expect to earn.
If you are not typical but consider yourself an elite employee, however, then financial services may well be where you can land your biggest paycheck, says Chad Dean, Tempe, Ariz.-based managing partner of Sanford Rose Associates, which recruits for a number of Wall Street investment banks. Indeed, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, in 2014 New York City securities firms paid employees $172,860 on average in bonuses alone.
Dean confirms that averages don’t tell the whole story about financial firms’ compensation, however. “It’s a pyramid structure,” he says. “It’s not like everybody over there is making that kind of money. Very few reach the top in private equity.”
To get on the fast-track to that kind of money, Dean says you’ll need a Ph.D. in math or physics from a Top 20 university or an MBA from a business school, such as Harvard Business School or the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, that Wall Street employers favor. “Then you’ll be starting out at $100,000 to $110,000 base salary, which with bonus will get you in the $140,000 to $150,000 range year one,” he says. After a few years, moving to a private equity firm could boost compensation to around $250,000.
Whether you take your math doctorate to Wall Street or design databases for Google, be prepared for hours and cutthroat competition. “It doesn’t get any longer and more cutthroat than in banking in my opinion,” Dean says. “There’s no easy way to make money.”
Looking forward, the wisest career move is to stick to services, emphasize tech, consulting or law, and avoid any job a machine could to.
“Economists today see routine types of jobs that are easy to automate are being outsourced and disappearing,” says Chamberlain. “What are growing, and where wages are growing faster, are non-routine jobs that require lots of judgment and specialized skills.”
