THE UNIVERSAL DIMENSIONS OF EVERY JOB THAT DETERMINE YOUR PAY

Whether you are an accountant, an airline pilot, an arborist or an analyst, you are paid for varying amounts of the same three job components. "Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy", it doesn't matter; you are paid for the same three things. "Butcher, baker, candlestick-maker"...doesn't matter. Everybody is paid based on the same three compensable factors of job-content. Make no mistake, while all jobs are paid based on the same three factors, the amount of those factors in each job varies immensely. 

In America, The Equal Pay Act labels them " Skill, Effort and Responsibility." My former employer famously called them, "Know-How, Problem-Solving and Accountability".  Indeed, they go by many names. This is how we describe them at executivepaybook.com: Required Expertise, Required Mental Acuity and  Stewardship of resources to produce results.  Let's take a deeper dive.

1) REQUIRED EXPERTISE

Employers are willing to pay for the expertise necessary to perform the job they seek to fill therefore it is a fundamental compensable factor. Expertise can be acquired either through academic regimen or on-the-job experience, usually, it is a combination of both. Virtually all statistical analyses of pay practices over the last century provide a direct correlation between expertise ( acquired either academically or experientially) and level of pay. 

2) REQUIRED MENTAL ACUITY

For most jobs, particularly as one advances in one's career, it is not enough to know how to perform a given set of tasks typically found in the job description. Employers typically require managers, leaders and professionals to apply their expertise and judgment to emerging job-related opportunities, risks, and threats. It's one thing to know how to do a task; it's quite another to create a new procedure to address an unprecedented situation. Employers pay for the mental acuity necessary to address emerging challenges that go beyond the tried and true.

3) STEWARDSHIP OF RESOURCES TO PRODUCE RESULTS

Every job is invested with some degree of stewardship to produce intended results. Indeed, the intended results are the reason the job exists in the first place. Companies provide job holders with an array of resources to facilitate the work processes that lead to the intended results. Employers entrust employees with financial resources in the form of operating budgets, human resources in the form of subordinate staff, physical resources in the form of office space, manufacturing facilities, warehouses, computers and other tools, all intended to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the job holder. Stewardship of these resources explicitly includes the authority to use and deploy them to improve organizational performance. Employees are held to account for the stewardship of their assigned resources to produce the intended performance outcomes of the job.

That's it. Those are the three universal compensable factors contained in some combination, in every job, in every company and organization. Here at executivepaybook.com, our members are informed as to the relative size of their job based on these universal compensable factors and how competitive their current pay package stacks up in today's marketplace.