IT-Related Job Search Tools

DISCLAIMER: The salary projections from Payscale.com and living standards estimates from Salary.com, are not accurate, and do not represent real-world situations. Estimates from both sites are based on user submitted data. Real-world figures are based on your experience in a specific industry, skill set, and location. If you live in the United States, visit the Bureau of Labor Statistics site, which uses area wage survey data collected by the government. Note, that survey data from the government is dated, and may not reflect current salary and living standards data.

If you are an IT worker and in the market for job offers, consider a few (and largely free) tools to help with your next career move:

Check Average Hourly Rates/Salaries – Use Payscale.com to check for salaries for a future job.

Here’s an example search.

I want to search for Technology Support jobs in the Los Angeles area:

1. Go to www.payscale.com
2. Select Job Seeker and click on the red button for Continue
3. Enter an Expected Job Title – this field will automatically display the most common job titles related to your search. For this example, I chose Technical Support Specialist
4. Enter years of technical support experience
5. For Country, City, Sate/Province/Region, you can enter your current residence, or check salaries for different states or countries. You’ll be amazed at the estimates you’ll receive at the end of the report
6. You will be asked for three top critical skills related to your job title – enter your three top skills and strengths. You can enter more than three skills if you like. Hint: After entering a skill in the first field, click on the Add another Skills/Specialties link to continue adding more skills
7. You also have the opportunity to add your certifications
8. hit Next –>
9. Type of Employer – usually, I select Company in this field, unless you are planning to work for a government or non-profit group
10. For Employer’s Product/Business, you can enter the industry in which you want to work in, eg: Computing Solutions – Hardware
11. For education information, enter your school in the School You Attended field
12. Enter a Major, then a degree, and the year you graduated
13. Want to see your Payscale profile? Click on No thanks… just show my salary report
14. Click on the Continue button at the bottom one last time. Payscale will now display your job seeker profile
15. If you are seeking to become an hourly employee at your next work place, you may see a graph similar to this one: 
16. Let’s read more into the graph above: the average hourly rate for a Technical Support Specialist position in Los Angeles, with ## years of experience, skills, years in the industry, and other factors, earns about $22.25 per hour. The lowest reported hourly wage is $15.86, and the highest reported hourly wage is $30.87 per hour. Tip: If you are about to write a cover letter and submit your resume via e-mail, you may want to use this feature of Payscale.com to negotiate a starting hourly rate
17. If you are looking to fill a full time, annually salaried position, click on the Salary link to the right to see an estimated annual salary range: 
18. Let’s read into this scenario a little bit more (see the annual, Salary graph below). As an annual employee for a company in Los Angeles, under the role of Technical Support Specialist, the lowest reported annual salary offered by a company is $34,119 annually. What does this mean? It means that whoever reported this salary to Payscale.com, was offered an annual salary of $34,119 – but note, that some companies will have different budgets, needs, support structures, and environments, which will vary greatly from the estimates you will receive on Payscale.com. The average annual salary for this role is $51,027, and the highest reported annual salary is $73,310.

Check and Compare Standards of Living for two Locations using Salary.com

Salary.com helps you plan your next career move if you are planning to move out of your current residence. In the following example, we will compare the standard of living at my current area against a target area.

I currently live in Los Angeles, and I want to compare the standards of living between Los Angeles and Tacoma. Here we go…

1. Use Salary.com’s Cost of Living Wizard to begin
2. Enter your starting annual salary (use Payscale.com’s tool above to convert your hourly rate into an annual salary figure)
3. For Present Location, and under Home, I chose California – Los Angeles, and for Work, I chose California – Long Beach
4. For New Location, I want to move to Tacoma, and I chose Washington – Tacoma for Home, and plan to work in Washington – Seattle
5. Click on Calculate at the bottom
6. A side-by-side bar chart will be displayed, summarizing the differences in cost of living between your current area, and an area in which you plan to move into. The interesting information from this result is that, in order to maintain your standard of living in Los Angeles, you would need to earn, at a minimum, an annual salary of $52,449. This suggests that you should not accept any job offers below the annual minimum of $52,449 in Seattle: 

How Valuable is it to be Certified?

This site breaks down salary reports by certification level (year 2010 data)

Do you have any tools that you would like to share for job hunting and career planning? Leave a comment.