Clicktale’s UX Salary Survey 2012

So, it has been a few weeks since I lasted posted something on my blog. Well, I was on holiday… I am sure you would do the same.

In my absence, some interesting reports have published. The first one that I would quickly like to cover is Clicktale’s UX Salary Survey 2012.

A few months ago, Clicktale launched the UX Salary Survey, inviting anyone employed in the User Experience field to participate. Worldwide, 543 UX professionals participated in the survey. Now, I won’t be quick to judge, but this number seems awfully low in regards to the number of people we find in our online networks.

According to Clicktale, the survey was initiated to:

compare your compensation to industry peers, better understand what drives compensation in this market, and learn how to increase your value

Personally, I have been working on that last point for quite some time, but I have always been eager to find out more about my peers. Job listings these days hardly ever mention salaries, or even a mere indication of it.

So what does your fellow UX compadre earn?

Clicktale reports that half of the respondents earns anywhere between $50.000 and $125.000 per year. 20% of the participants reported salaries even higher than this. An interesting find is that salaries seemed to peak between the ages of 51 and 55 seeing a drop after that to as low as $75.000 per year.

Here is a small sample of Clicktale’s other findings:

• Salaries in the financial and health fields tend to be higher, and salaries in the transportation and hospitality fields tend to be lower [note to self = looks like there is room for improvement for me ]
• In general, men and women earn comparable salaries. However, the number of men who receive high salaries is relatively larger than the number of women receiving high salaries.
• Salaries tend to be relatively higher in North America, Australia and Central America. The UX US salary average is more than double that of Europe. [note to self = discuss emigration to one of these three continents with family :)]
• Almost half of the respondents (45.5%) receives an annual bonus.

[Source: Clicktale's UX Salary Survey 2012]

Sentiment & Stability

A nice addition to the survey are the questions regarding job security and satisfaction. According to those surveyed:

• Satisfaction goes up as salaries increase.
• Satisfaction increases as job security goes up.
• UX employees working in the insurance industry are the lease satisfied with their job.
• Satisfaction goes down as the amount of employees in a company increases.

[Source: Clicktale's UX Salary Survey 2012]

Who wins?

Basically, the report taught me that the UX Salary Champions match the following description:

Are males with a post-graduate degree and knowledge of IBM Unica, aged between 51-55 years, and work for a Finance company with more than 10.000 employees and that generate more than $10B in revenue. Anyone know of any openings? Please share it in the comments

Download Survey Results

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Matthew Niederberger

Digital Insights and Analytics Manager at Philips

Matthew works as Digital Insights and Analytics Manager at Philips. In his free time he enjoys family life as well as digging into online user research material whilst frequently generating some of his own, which he freely shares here on actualinsights.com.

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