Find A Career Path With PayScale’s GigZig
Nick Gonzalez
9 comments »
Since 2002, PayScale has been providing compensation profiles for all sorts of jobs. Unlike Salary.com, they get their data through user submissions instead of company survey data. They encourage people to avoid specious entries by offering more targeted analysis to people providing more information, which in turn enhances the data they already have. Since launch they’ve collected over 8 million job profiles ranging from barristers to bloggers and they’re starting to put it to even greater use.
PayScale has remixed the data to launch a new service called GigZig, a search engine that tells workers what kinds of career paths a job fits into. The engine takes a job title and spits two columns of positions with average salary statistics. One column lists the most common jobs a person with the queried title had 5 years ago. The other column lists the most common current jobs for people who had the queried title 5 years ago. All the data is based on the 25% of users that tell PayScale what their previous positions were.
An example search is “Product Manager”. Five years ago most current Product Managers were Assistant Product Managers. The most common current position for people who were Product Managers five years ago is Marketing Manager. The results on each side are organized by frequency, denoted by the number of yellow people icons filled in. Three icons means 20% or more people had that position, while two icons on down mean less than 8%.
PayScale plans to implement other reuses of their data in the near future, including one that should excite college freshmen, what degrees lead to what jobs.
See our coverage last year of SalaryScout, a competitor.
Wow, sweet. Going to go check it out now and probably post what I find.
By getting statistics from actual subscribers and not from just employer’s figures is great for finding out how the job market is for each job seeker. You can see what and when things are hot or cold based on the performance.
They seem to have some very useful data and shouldn’t have problems finding other uses for that data.
I like the idea that they can track a job over a number of years and that can be quite useful to anybody in any market.
We post a PayScale salary calculator on our site, http://myfirstpaycheck.com/resources.html and have gotten a lot of positive feedback. This seems like another fun and useful tool.
This sounds very cool and I particularly like the fact that as one gives more info, they receive more info.
Might be a good way for one of these open web business directories to beef up their products.
Offtopic:
Those spider ads really creep me out. I can work with clown ads but spider ads unnerve me. Thanks for listening.
This is pretty good stuff from PayScale. It is doesn’t sound like rocket-science but then, folks like Monster and CareerBuilder have had access to the ‘career pathing” information for a long time (and even salary in relationship with Salary.com). The fact that PayScale has done this in such short order of time is a testament to them and validates the effectiveness of user generated content based intelligence.
Interesting post, thanks. The GigZig is cool, BTW. Let’s see what they implement even more..
Pretty useful info. Though I don’t care to join.
I’m impressed that they were able to get so many job profiles. Even if the profiles were based on user submission instead of company reference, I wonder how PayScale motivated people to be truthful or rather, why they believe that they succeeded in doing so.
In Israel, Jacob Richman conducts an annual salary survey of the many subscribers to his CJI newsletter. If anything, I think that people are truthful because the survey questionnaire is relatively quick to do and the submitters probably figure that this is a way of showing appreciation for the free CJI newsletter.
More info about his year’s survey here:
http://jobmob.co.il/blog/jacob.....available/