People are generally curious as to how their compensation package stacks up to others in their field. This knowledge is useful as a measuring stick to make sure that you aren’t being taken advantage of.
Of course, it can also be detrimental to one’s job satisfaction, so keep in mind that this information isn’t vetted so people may be exaggerating, lying or their situation may be entirely different from yours.
There are a few new sites that allow you to compare your earnings to others:
- Wage Exchange focuses on Accounting / Audit / Finance, IT / Software Development and Advertising / Marketing / Public Relations
- PayScale is a little more generalized and also provides greater detail and comparative analysis
- Salary Scout also gives good comparative data, and adds social networking in that users can “rate” one anothers pay packages
