After going over pay for techs., crew chiefs, and project managers this post will examine pay for senior archaeologists e.g. top of the work hierarchy such as those in charge of an officer/region or owner of a company. See previous posts for methodology. The results were, in $ per hr-
Pay- Archaeology Senior 2011 Graph
As can be seen in the graph there has been a huge upswing in salaries being offered for top CRM archaeologists in the US since 2010. Some positions are being offered with salaries up to $40.48 ($85,000 annually) but some were for as low as $ 20 ($41,600 annually). There is great variability in pay between regions and companies. The average is around $30.68 ($64,000 a year) but this assumes that most people fall in the middle between what is the lowest offered salary and the highest. This data is from job postings so reality might be slightly different and the data has a very small sample size which might also affect the results.
Pay- Archaeology Senior 2011 Data
Lumbergh
March 10, 2012
Interesting. Thanks for posting. I always mean to take a closer look at the ACRA pay data and never do it. It helps to have it “capsulized” in separate posts, as you’ve done here. A great service you’re doing for the CRM community, getting this info out; I wish someone had done this when I was in undergrad and grad school.
Anyway, I’m a senior PI and make about $60k, maybe $70k with bonuses in very good years. I would add this bit of anecdotal data: at full service environmental firms, especially big global companies, senior level CRM people are sometimes slotted into a corporate structure at an executive level with other senior environmental and planning folks and can make a LOT more than the max here, while still generally doing the same CRM management work as those of us at small firms. I know of several senior CRM people who have VP titles or similar and are making $120-150k. I have to stress this is quite rare but it does happen, but I’ve never seen it represented in any of these surveys, which is odd because these are the people who I would think would be movers and shakers in ACRA and similar organizations that collect and analyze such data.
Doug Rocks-Macqueen
March 11, 2012
The ACRA surveys did have a few outliers with people making 300K a year assuming the $150 they charge per hour is full time. I would not be surprised if there were quite a few in the 100k-200k range and maybe one or two owners who have 500K salaries pre-2008.
The limits of job postings is that they don’t tend to capture the outliers.
Lumbergh
March 16, 2012
Thanks for the clarification. I just looked at the ACRA data and I must have been thinking of another survey.
One thing that is frustrating here in the US is that people are very secretive about salaries due to various perceived liability issues and cultural factors. When I started in US CRM I could not find any information at all like this; all negotiations were based on guesswork, which resulted (as I found out later) in people in equivalent roles making salaries that diverged by 50-70%.
I have lived in various parts of Europe and was often surprised there by how open people would be about this kind of thing, even in casual cocktail-party-type contexts (“I’m a lawyer/teacher/etc, it’s a pretty good position, I make about X euros a month”). Here in the US, there’s all that psychological baggage from excessive worship of wealth that makes everyone loath to divulge how much they make, plus many companies will tell employees that divulging salary data is releasing confidential company information, whether or not that’s true or even legal…
Doug Rocks-Macqueen
March 16, 2012
I work in Europe currently and it is suprising how open it is about salaries. Even in advertisments. In the UK 99% of job adverts (archaeology and heritage anyways) list salary. Sometimes it is the first think listed. In the states maybe 15-30% of job adverts list salary. (makes my numbers a little less accurate but they stack up well next the the SAA and ACRA surveys so they are pretty accurate).
The reason I have put this data together is because i could not find any of the data myself. Even ACRA holds their surveys behind their paywall and it is not too well advetrtised. (ACRA does give out the infotmation if you ask for it).
My undergrad university use to publish a list of everyones salaries (it was a public university so they had to) in a book. The book was kept behind the desk in the library and you had to know it existed to get it. Funny enough if you called HR and asked for someone’s salary like the presidents (published in newspapers) they would say it was not legal for them to give out that information. I wonder if salaries are really “confidential company information”. hhmmm something I shall look into.