PayScale: Get to know what you are worth!

Ever sat during a job interview wondering what exactly to say when the million dollar question about pay package came up? Ever wondered how much you are worth, with the skill sets you have? The other day I wandered Google to find out how a particular career I had in mind is placed in India, in terms of the pay scale. That was when Google gave me a link to PayScale.

PayScale is a web service that allows you to dig into the 'salary' side of different careers. It allows you to compare your salary with your peers. It allows you to see how a particular career pays. For example, see the following graph that allows you to see how much different jobs are worth in India right now:

Median Salary by Job - Country: India (India)

CAREER TOOLS: Salary Calculator, Career Path Tool, Cost of Living Calculator, Meeting Miser

Also see an example that shows you how a male or a female is paid in India:

Median Salary by Gender - Country: India (India)

CAREER TOOLS: Salary Calculator, Career Path Tool, Cost of Living Calculator, Meeting Miser

Now, that is interesting. Even after so much of women's lib, a female is still paid lesser in India when compared to her male counterpart. Don't you worry. So is the case in United States, Canada, France, UK, you name it. Women are paid lesser than men in most of the countries that I tried. Women, you need to wake up!

PayScale was launched in 2002 by PayScale, Inc, an American Company.  It works gathering data from users, employers and employees who take PageScale Surveys. It has an option which lets you compare your pay scale with your peers. It is a tedious job, as PayScale asks you many questions over and over again. It asks you to answer same questions again and again. When you are answering those questions, PayScale is actually gathering data to update its database. It uses the data to generate reports and graphs that tell us who is worth what. They say they report only actual data to avoid erroneous assumptions.

Here is one thing I really liked about PayScale. When they give you a graph or a report, they tell you how many people contributed information to make that graph or report. Now, this helps me decide whether to take the report seriously or not. Especially because they are doing actual reporting and they are not telling me their assumptions.

I hunted down many graphs and reports on PayScale that gave me an idea about the career trends. As I was doing that, I found that there is lesser participation from people in India. I think, at least for the sake of building a usable database that helps people keep track of pay scale trends, Indians should participate in PayScale. The more number of people participating in PayScale, the more authentic it is going to be. I hope that in a few months or years from now PayScale will have more authentic information about pay scales so that we know where we are going when the million dollar question about pay package comes up during an interview.