PayScale & Salary.com

Salary.com Overview:

Salary.com is a great resource for anyone looking for financial information in their field. It is free and tailors salary information for the individual on a basic level. It includes national and regional salary comparisons, and estimates salaries based on years of experience, company reputation and relevance, and your status in the business. While this does prove to be a good basic resource, it is also laden with distracting advertisements which detracts from the ease of navigation on the website. Also, if you are looking for a more personalized salary report, you must pay and register which is something many people are hesitant to do. The website does provide some very basic job assessments and a “cost of living” calculator based on careers, as well as a spot for job openings.

PayScale Overview:

PayScale is an advanced resource providing similar financial information on careers, but in a much more personalized way. It features a minimalist and easy to navigate interface, and allows people to create a salary report for free. Although it is required to register for the report, the account is anonymous and only takes 15 seconds to create. They do not sell your information or send you newsletters unless you request for them to do so. The salary report is very in-depth and covers all aspects of the potential/current job. It asks everything from your degree type to the type of company, and provides many more career titles than Salary.com. It also generates a report with several variable salaries based on different factors such as company size and experience for you to evaluate at your discretion.

Aside from the benefits for students or workers, this resource becomes beneficial for educators as well. It allows them to evaluate the different salaries in the region for careers that their students may be interested in, and allows them to educate the students about negotiating their salaries and what they should expect their lifestyle to entail should they choose that career. It also allows employers to see what other businesses are paying their employees in comparison to their own.

Summary:

Salary.com and Payscale.com are both good resources and both have their strong points in different areas. However, Payscale is more precise in its salary estimates due to how specific it is as you can see below.

Here I have provided a small example of a typical data report for the title of Speech Pathologist in Sarasota, FL via Salary.com:

Here I have provided a small visual example of the data salary report for the title of Pediatric Speech Language Pathologist in Sarasota, FL:

As you can see, there is a large difference between the two salaries reported. This is because Salary.com is much broader with their job titles and Payscale allows you to narrow down your career to the exact field you expect to work in, something especially important with healthcare and STEM workers. It is important to provide students with closer and more specific salary estimates, lest they settle for less or find that their job does not provide them with the lifestyle they expected.

Career One Stop:Career One Stop was an interesting resource for students and workers. It provides a lot of basic information on careers such as salaries by state and lists of increasing and declining occupations. It takes a lot of its information from O*Net, presumably because it is a Department of Labor sponsored resource as well. When you click to the links for self-assessments, they redirect you to tests on the O*Net webpage as seen below:

This could be helpful to people who have a limited knowledge of these resources, but could become a bit redundant to a student who is familiar with the programs already.

One of the strongest qualities that Career One Spot has is their wide variety of resources. Not only do they provide basic career information (similar to OOB), but they provide a lot of information about interviewing, resumes, etc. They also have a section dedicated to resources for people who may have past criminal records, veterans, workers with disabilities, people who have been laid off, and more. Below I included the overview page for people with disabilities who are looking for jobs:

That being said, this website could be especially useful to anyone in a unique situation who is looking to change or further their career.

They also provide connections to local resources for career help, as well as information on training needed for a career or how to update old skills if you are returning to school/work after a long period of time.

Glassdoor:Glassdoor is, I think, a fantastic resource for anyone researching a specific company they would like to work for or to get a feel for the types of opportunities available to them in their local area.

It is a bit of a pain to work with, only because they give you very limited insight into their content unless you register for an account with them.

I do feel as though it provides a lot of good information about companies and practices. They provide user-written reviews by people who have interviewed or worked at these places. The interview reviews are very valuable because they sometimes include the difficulty of the interview, some questions they were asked, the environment, and whether or not they were offered the job.

Larger companies are probably best suited for this type of research, as it provides a lot more reviews and some people submit their occupation and salary when they worked there.

Aside from this, Glassdoor is known across social media for their lists that they put out every so often of the best companies to work for, the employee’s choice companies, and more.

All in all, I think this resource is great for those preparing to graduate or anyone who has a highly specific company/position in mind. It can also get people thinking about companies they may have overlooked that are highly rated.