LinkedIn Salary Compares Salaries Across Regions and Industries
LinkedIn has launched a new portal called LinkedIn Salary that tracks and analyzes pay at work, so you can compare your paycheck with your peers and see what other people usually earn.
LinkedIn is, of course, a professional networking site acquired by Microsoft earlier this year that allows you to connect with your professional peers, who are looking to expand their pragmatic offerings beyond social media and job listings. This new payroll portal is a useful tool that works as you’d expect: you can search for something like “plumber” in a given region and the site displays what they think is the average pay. You can also dive deeper into the data, and some general posts even provide information on typical bonuses or stock options.
It is based primarily on anonymous data submitted by users in order to hopefully create an accurate and complete database. This also means that some jobs contain much more information than others; do a search for “software engineer from San Francisco” and you will get detailed information that even includes salaries for specific companies, because more than 4,000 people in San Francisco volunteered their data. Find something more niche — say, a “veterinarian” —and you get a salary estimate based on just 20 answers.
The site will be free for a year if you list your salary (a smart way to collect data they say will remain confidential). Otherwise, you need to subscribe to LinkedIn Premium if you don’t want to volunteer your salary information. Alternatively, you can use one of the other tools like GlassDoor or PayScale .