Hi I'm Jeri Walker with Your Best Designed Career I'm a CPA with more than
25 years of experience in the accounting and finance field I've interviewed hired
trained and mentored accounting professionals at all levels and now I'm
here to help you with your accounting and finance career let's talk about
salary research let's just say that you live in Chicago and you prepare an
interview for a Financial Controller position you go to indeed.com to
research salaries and it lists an average salary for a Financial
Controller at eighty five thousand two hundred and sixty dollars that seems a
little low so you keep researching and download the salary guide of a
well-known executive recruiting firm and it says the salary for a Financial
Controller is two hundred thirty five thousand and fifty dollars so which is
accurate I've been a Financial Controller I've interviewed financial
controllers and I've worked at a recruiting firm that placed financial
controllers and I can tell you that neither one of these are typical salary
numbers for a Financial Controller now I want you to have some really reliable
sources of salary information so to save you the trouble what I did was I took a
sampling of thirteen different cities across the United States and I compared
the salary results of eight different salary research websites to what I know
from my own experience as a Financial Controller as well as the feedback that
I've received from my clients and here's what I found look at all the different
amounts I found for a Financial Controller salary in the Chicago area
preparing for a job interview is tough enough without having uncertainty about
what really is a reasonable salary expectation for a particular position
it's easier than ever to find salary information but the problem is is that
it's easy to find inaccurate information so which one of these is accurate let's
talk about the outliers so these two on the low end came from zip recruiter and
indeed now without exception for all 13 metropolitan areas that I researched
zipper cruder and indeed provided the lowest salary amounts so I recommend
that you don't use either one of these sites to conduct your salary research
now similarly with respect to the two outliers on the upper end again for
every single city these two resources provided the highest salary results now
these figures here come from salary comm and from the salary guide of an
executive recruiting firm now if we remove the outliers we're left with a
salary range of roughly a hundred to a hundred forty five thousand dollars now
this is still a wide salary range but based on what I know most Financial
Controller salaries in Chicago will fall within this range of course there are
going to be exceptions there are a lot of factors that impact salary things
like company size industry your level of education your certifications your level
of experience will all impact salary and you'll want to factor all of those
things into your own research but for now let me show you where I found the
for salary numbers within this range and how I arrived at my numbers now note
that in an attempt to keep my research as consistent as possible if a website
offered filtered options what I always used was the mid-career level or the ten
to fourteen years of experience as my option so starting at the bottom of our
range one hundred thousand ninety five dollars
is the salary provided by payscale.com and this is the average salary of an
experienced Financial Controller in the Chicago area
the next salary amount is a hundred seventeen thousand and some change and
this is the number quoted by store.com for a financial controller
with 10 to 14 years of experience and then the salary research tool in
LinkedIn gives us an amount of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars as the total
compensation of a financial controller I do like Glassdoor and LinkedIn as
research tools but I have found that their salary numbers are slightly
understated not by a lot but in general they tend to be a little understated so
be sure to keep that in mind now at the top of the scale at $145,000 is the
information I found on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website and it's
Occupational Outlook Handbook now it does list a median pay here of about a
hundred and twenty-eight thousand but this is an average across the country
this website also allows you to download a ton of raw data and really drill down
on geographical locations which is what I did to arrive at the one hundred forty
five thousand dollar amount for Chicago so of the eight resources that I
researched I recommend that you use Glassdoor LinkedIn and the Occupational
Outlook Handbook for your salary research use salary estimates for all
three sites so you can develop a salary arrange that I believe is going to be
accurate now I'll put links to all of these down below so you can get to them
easily I hope this helps you get your salary research legwork done if this was
helpful to you please like this video and share it with others who need to
have this information and if you want to learn more things you should be doing in
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watching I'll see you next time
you