Anders Ramsay, User Experience Designer and a long-time mentor in the IA Institute’s mentoring program, wrote down some great questions to think about before you approach a prospective mentor. See his list here:
IA/UX Salary Surveys
Based on a recent request on the IA Institute Job Board, I have compiled some IA/UX salary information resources. As soon as the IAI salary survey comes out, I’ll post a link here.
Very few of the postings I receive on the IA Institute Job Board have salary information, but a typical salary/rate conversion is:
salary = 2/3 rate times 2080 (40 hours per week for a year)
The 1/3 reduction represents the cost of your medical, vacation and other benefits plus social security taxes that the company pays.
For $75/hour, this equals $104,000/year, which appears to be on the high end for those jobs where I do have salary data. Salary.com shows salary+bonus capping around 110K for most experienced IA/UX type jobs, although their job titles don’t conform perfectly to the industry yet.
The IA Institute is supposed to publish the results of the 2005 survey this month. They are a bit behind schedule, but keep looking for the survey at http://www.iainstitute.org.
Some other surveys:
2004 UX Salary Survey
http://www.spiritsoftworks.com/resources/2004-salary-survey.htm
2003 AIfIA Salary Survey
http://iainstitute.org/pg/salary_survey_2003.php
IA Wiki – links to more salary surveys
http://www.iawiki.net/SalarySurveys
Salary.com Salary Wizard
http://www.salary.com/salary/layoutscripts/sall_display.asp
Since Salary.com job titles don’t appear to reflect titles used in the IA industry, here are some equivalent job titles:
Interface Designer = User Experience & HCI
Content Engineer = Information Architect