With the holidays behind us and an entire new year ahead, this is the time of the year when the thoughts of many will turn to compensation. For corporations, this is the time of year when personnel review sessions typically take place. It is also the time when corporations usually award annual bonuses and merit increases. As these events occur and both managers and employees settle in at their new levels of compensation, some will be satisfied and some will not be. But regardless of one’s level of contentment, it is a good practice to spend some time thinking about one’s financial future and potential earnings over the term of one’s career. And that can and probably should lead to thoughts about one’s career itself.
The Master Equation
The first question to ask yourself seems obvious. How much longer do you want to keep working? The answers to this question can vary widely. Some people don’t want to work one day longer than they have to. Others, like me, probably could retire but we stay working because we love what we do. Your own answer may be at either extreme or somewhere in the middle, but the equation you’ll use to determine your potential earnings will be the same:
Average Annual Earnings * Working Years = Total Potential Earnings.
So, once you decide on the number for the Working Year variable, then you have to decide where you want your Average Annual Earnings to be and that’s where the subject of compensation levels come into play.
Average Annual Earnings
Now, we’re back to where we were in the first paragraph and that causes us to ask ourselves some questions.
- Are we satisfied with our current earnings vs. our job and the compensation market for persons with like jobs?
- What is my career goal job/earnings-wise and is there a path to get me there?
While the AirComp Calculator can help you with answers to the first question, the second one will require some soul searching.
Career Paths
For some folks who are in line positions, e.g. pilot, flight attendant, technician, scheduler, all they want to do is their line job and they don’t care about increased responsibility or growth. They’re happy to come to work and do their jobs but they’re not interested in managerial responsibilities. For these people, their rate of annual compensation growth will be steady but more gradual.
Other folks have ambitions to climb the leadership ladder in business aviation, perhaps aspiring to become chief pilots, directors of maintenance, lead schedulers or flight attendants, and maybe moving into the aviation director position. The compensation growth for these folks can be aggressive, but it will require more working hours than those in line positions, and it may require a change of company and/or location.
Making Yourself More Valuable
The choice of career goal notwithstanding, some important questions to ask yourself are: What am I doing to make myself more valuable? What additional qualifications should I attain? What professional certifications should I pursue? (I’ll make a shameless plug here for the NBAA Certified Aviation Manager [CAM] credential. The level of knowledge required to pass the test is extensive and requires intense study, but it fills in gaps in your business-aviation expertise, makes you a better employee and better contributor for the industry.) You might want to consider an advanced degree. If you eventually want to run a flight department or aviation organization, I can’t recommend a master’s degree in business administration (MBA) highly enough. Flight departments and aviation organizations are businesses and having an MBA provides knowledge and perspective that you will use. The bottom line here is that by increasing your knowledge, expertise, and usefulness, you’ll make yourself better qualified for your current job or the next one, and command higher compensation than you would have otherwise.
To Move or Not to Move
When I was chief pilot for a telecommunications company in the Midwest, I had four pilots working for me, one of whom had been there nearly 30 years. There was a time in our industry where this was the dream scenario. Join an aviation department for a Fortune 500 company and stay there until retirement. But this scenario is becoming less common. Today, a majority of business aviation personnel will work multiple jobs at multiple companies in their careers. The reasons for their moves are many and varied but, in most cases, there are three. One reason is a desire for a position with increased responsibility that is not available in the current company/department. Another is to escape a toxic culture and/or boss. The final reason is to attain a higher level of compensation at a different employer. While the first two make sense, the last one doesn’t always. The HR types will tell you that most people won’t leave a job merely for higher compensation, there will always be other reasons. In most cases, they’re not wrong. A failure to pay at market rates is usually a function of the company culture. But there are some in our industry who focus somewhat myopically on compensation and don’t consider other factors. While I understand the earnings equation, I would strongly argue that if you like coming to work every day and like the people you’re working with, sacrificing that for more dollars may not be the best answer. In addition to doing the compensation math, you need to do the quality-of-life math, the organizational culture math and leadership math. If you leave purely for compensation reasons, you can indeed make more money, but it can come at a higher personal cost.
Compensation Decisions Are Career Decisions
We’ll finish this discussion by pointing out the obvious. Compensation decisions are, in fact, career decisions. So, when you find yourself ruminating about your current level of compensation vs. what it could be, you’re actually ruminating about your career. If you like the compensation level you’re at and the path you’re on, stay where you are. If you don’t, it’s probably time to make a change. Just do yourself a favor, carefully consider your options and chose wisely.
