Find A Career Path With PayScale's GigZig

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.

payscalewidget1.pngPayScale 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.