In this issue we are pleased to present to you information we gathered through what we believe is a first-of-its-kind salary and compensation study of professionals in the information and communications technology (ICT) cabling industry. In the latter part of 2018 we collaborated with Fluke Networks to design, deploy and analyze a survey that aimed to get usable information about the payscales of professionals like yourselves across the United States. More than 1,200 people completed the survey, which allowed us to make comparisons within and between groups, and ultimately deliver to you the top-level results that you can find here.
For us here at Cabling Installation & Maintenance, gathering and reporting on compensation data is the fulfillment of an ambition we have had for a number of years. It has been apparent for some time that such information would be useful to many in the industry. But in the past when I talked to business owners, installers, technicians, project managers and others in the field, I feared my objective of pinpointing compensation numbers would be elusive. I remember an owner of a contracting firm explaining to me that what he paid his technicians could vary from job to job. For example, a project in a downtown urban area incurs costs for parking—including the inevitable parking ticket or two incurred while unloading the truck on the city street—that the contractor and the technician didn’t have to worry about on a project in a different setting. Then there’s the issue of whether or not it’s a prevailing-wage job. It seemed a study of what employers pay employees would be overly complex.
Then the pros at Fluke Networks opened my eyes to the reality that it didn’t have to be as complicated as I was making it. If we looked at it through the other end of the lens—the employee rather than the employer—we could make it work. So that’s what we did. With more than 1,200 respondents, we had enough data to create general profiles.
All in all, I believe the data we’re presenting to you in this issue is a good start, as well as a conversation starter. We plan to make this study an annual project. With that in mind, we’d like to hear your thoughts on the data we’re reporting now, as well as what you’d find valuable in future studies. Should we ask about parking tickets? Something tells me there’s information you might find even more valuable than that. Like you, we try to improve continuously. Please let us know how we can do that.
