Salary Scale
-
Chargerfan
- Posts: 10
- Joined: Fri Feb 06, 2015 7:26 pm
Salary Scale
I got a question: Has anyone ever heard of this? I was offered a contract recently and the director said the way their school delegates your position on the salary scale is they take your years of experience and divide it by 2. They round up if it's half way, for example (7 years would be 3.5 so you would be at the year 4 scale). Does that make sense, or was I being bamboozled? Has anyone experienced something like this?
Re: Salary Scale
It's one way, and yes I've seen it before. Other ways include capping experience at a certain number of years.
Schools set their own practices in this regard, so the only way you would be bamboozled would be if the school was using this method only for you, while giving others credit for more years.
In the end, you have to decide whether the offer you're given is one you can accept. If you do accept, I recommend letting go of any questions like this one. A sure way to breed unhappiness is to continually collect and dwell on thoughts about what might be wrong.
Schools set their own practices in this regard, so the only way you would be bamboozled would be if the school was using this method only for you, while giving others credit for more years.
In the end, you have to decide whether the offer you're given is one you can accept. If you do accept, I recommend letting go of any questions like this one. A sure way to breed unhappiness is to continually collect and dwell on thoughts about what might be wrong.
Response
Yes, its one of several common means of creating a compensation scale, and they can fit more steps on one piece of paper. If you want "year to step" equivalence double the number of steps and half the difference in salary between steps, so now your a step 8 and your still getting the same compensation. Schools will pay what they think a certain caliber of teacher is worth, how they diagram that on paper is irrelevant. Many school have caps on service and salary, and other limits. This school instead of putting a cap on service just made it impracticable to to hit the upper caps.
None of this indicates whether your being taken advantage of. The whole story could be fabricated unless the school has an open and published salary scale, fewer and fewer schools do. The admin could have just picked that number out of the air, and they could offer a different teacher with similar credentials more or less. They could offer you more for being an Anglo, or a male, or any number of factors.
I strongly agree with Sid on this aspect. The only issue for you is if the compensation on offer is acceptable, how they got to it really doesnt matter. If you accept you will save yourself a lot of sanity if you then let it go. Its one reason schools can and will terminate or non-renew an IT for discussing their salary, its just creates problems and ruins faculty cohesion.
If you want to negotiate, most schools are pretty firm, and you cant just ask for more money. What you can do is negotiate what experiences you have that is worth experience credit. If your school doesnt have a compensation category for advance degrees or extra certifications (that are relevant to the position) you could negotiate that a masters degree or another degree is worth 2 years experience and an extra step. Additional certifications may be worth a year of experience. A marketable ASP qualification that the school intends to market may worth half a year of experience. These things you can do, asking for more money because you think your worth it or its what you got before will just get you a "sorry we cant meet your requirements, this is our final offer", and they will just withdraw the offer.
None of this indicates whether your being taken advantage of. The whole story could be fabricated unless the school has an open and published salary scale, fewer and fewer schools do. The admin could have just picked that number out of the air, and they could offer a different teacher with similar credentials more or less. They could offer you more for being an Anglo, or a male, or any number of factors.
I strongly agree with Sid on this aspect. The only issue for you is if the compensation on offer is acceptable, how they got to it really doesnt matter. If you accept you will save yourself a lot of sanity if you then let it go. Its one reason schools can and will terminate or non-renew an IT for discussing their salary, its just creates problems and ruins faculty cohesion.
If you want to negotiate, most schools are pretty firm, and you cant just ask for more money. What you can do is negotiate what experiences you have that is worth experience credit. If your school doesnt have a compensation category for advance degrees or extra certifications (that are relevant to the position) you could negotiate that a masters degree or another degree is worth 2 years experience and an extra step. Additional certifications may be worth a year of experience. A marketable ASP qualification that the school intends to market may worth half a year of experience. These things you can do, asking for more money because you think your worth it or its what you got before will just get you a "sorry we cant meet your requirements, this is our final offer", and they will just withdraw the offer.