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MrWeb publishes regular statistics about UK MR jobs, salaries and jobseeker preferences in its free monthly supplement MRWho. Stats are based on vacancies advertised on the site, which constitute the great majority of all those advertised in the UK. Mean salaries are based on all job ads where salary is stated, which is currently about 70% of all those posted. You can view the number of vacancies currently listed on MrWeb in each category (RE, SRE etc..) as well as the mean salary for each level, any time on a separate page. Note that the means exclude benefits and packages and concentrate on the advertised amount for the basic salary - but also that advertised salaries can be a fraction higher than the true average for a variety of reasons.
Two Steps Forward, One Step BackBy Nick Thomas, August 2003Two years on from the downturn which started just before September 11th, and the UK research industry still seems very uncertain. There were many predictions about recovery beginning in earnest this year, and if you are looking for good signs you will find plenty in our salary and vacancy statistics, but it seems more stop-start than solid. The job market has been inconsistent this year, with a good month often followed by a bad and several company failures and numerous redundancies dotted between the stories of success and growth. Overall on the agency side numbers of vacancies are quite healthy again and recruiters are back to the old familiar problem of the dearth of acceptable candidates. The overall salary figures suggest that means are still creeping up, but only slowly - recruitment consultants generally see no significant difference this year. Agency side salaries have certainly remained fairly flat in the past 12 months, and whereas client side salaries at Research Manager level have increased substantially, from a mean £36,500 to £38,200 in the same period, the intermediate figure for late 2002 (£34,600) was the lowest for any six months since 2000, and fluctuating numbers of client side vacancies make it still more difficult to draw general conclusions from this. Number of VacanciesThe total number of executive jobs posted (and specifying salaries) was almost identical in the first and second halves of 2002 but has risen by 42% in the last 6 months* - this is more to do with new advertisers coming on board than with a general increase in the number of vacancies out there. The rise is mainly due to a larger number of Director, Project Manager and RE positions. In the same period the number of client side RM positions has actually fallen very slightly, although this is deceptively positive: the MrWeb site has seen a recent surge with the arrival of two new recruitment consultancy advertisers who specialise in or have a good proportion of client side jobs, but most recruiters say client side jobs are very scarce and even the specialists have many fewer than normal.In some cases, the effect seems likely to be long-term: ‘The simple fact’ says one recruiter ‘is that most of the UK MR functions in our biggest sector have been relocated to global headquarters ... usually in the US’. In others, there are encouraging signs in amongst the bad: ‘client companies are beginning to recruit again - although some fmcg clients are still culling positions in their research departments. This has been so up and down that its really hard for me to identify any particular trend’. Even on the client side, however, the talent pool problem is still in evidence. ‘I have just been to see a blue chip consumer client who have briefed three agencies on an attractive junior role’ said one recruiter this week. ‘We don’t have anyone suitable at the moment, and another agency have told them that not only do they have no-one suitable now, but they don’t expect to be able to send them any CVs in the future’. That said, clients are being fussy about who they will consider and often reject basically good candidates because of very specific criteria. Salary ChangesThe mean salary for a UK exec role (all levels, excluding Field and IT/ DP) advertised on MrWeb in Jan to June 2003 was £33,700 (base 1,045 jobs with salary specified). This is up from £32,500 (base 734) in July to Dec 2002 and £32,400 (base 735) in Jan to June last year. The main reason for this is a slight shift in the balance of vacancies towards more senior levels. There has been a 50% rise in the number of Director level opportunities posted. A secondary factor is the rise in Research Manager and Project Manager salaries.Our tip for ‘one to watch’ in late 2003 would definitely be SREs, the most common JobTitle on the site and often seen as the ‘engine room’ of agencies. The number of Research Executive positions advertised has risen by 53%, from 163 in 1st half 2002 to 229 in 1st half 2003, whilst the number of SREs has risen by only 13%. SRE salaries have not seen a substantial rise since the year 2000 and may be due for one, given that there has been a bulge working its way down over the last 2 years with rises in Director, AD and RM/ Project Manager salaries in consecutive periods to date, and good SREs continue to be much in demand and relatively thin on the ground. Most of our recruitment consultant advertisers are reluctant to comment on this as things are so uncertain, but some agree, one saying that ‘Mid range qual salaries are very stagnant in comparison to a very candidate-driven market from a couple of years ago’. Field and IT/DP positions are not coded by seniority and the figures for them are therefore less meaningful - however, it is notable that whereas the mean salary for any field job on MrWeb in the last 3 years has risen by a fair-enough 10%, that for DP and IT positions has actually fallen slightly - this reflects very difficult times in 2001 and 2002 for MR techies - things are improving since mid-2002, according to some sources. Mean salaries and bases for all levels for the last six half-years are shown in the table below and the graph at the top of the page, and the panels give details of US salaries and some further information about the progress of the MrWeb listings.
American MR SalariesFor the first time MrWeb has carried a substantial number of US vacancy ads, with 87 exec positions posted since January 1st (mostly since April). It is difficult to equate levels and positions to an extent, and apart from the lack of base for more junior vacancies [there have been fewer than 3 at each of RE and JRE level] we have tended to put jobs in more than one category [eg coding as SRE/ PM] a lot of the time which blurs the salary calculations. Caution is required, therefore - however, it’s clear from the table that salaries in the US are substantially higher than in the UK for equivalent positions.Note that we do not work solely on the basis of job titles, either in the UK or US. If a position is called ‘Project Manager’ but the responsibilities are clearly equivalent to those of what’s normally deemed to be a JRE, and the salary is £16k, for example - and this does happen - we will code it as a JRE. The ‘Equivalent’ US job titles given above are the ones we use as a guideline / for making selections on the US search page, but we’ll always look at the role more broadly to assess whether a vacancy really belongs in a particular category or will just prove a red herring for candidates. It’s impossible to make the codings - and therefore the mean salary calculations - totally watertight, but the definitions are consistent and seem to work in practice.
Site ProgressObviously, numbers of vacancies posted reflects our success or otherwise in attracting advertisers as well as the overall state of the industry. It has been a very good 6 months for the site: MrWeb now has 13 regular advertisers in the UK, against 10 in January/most of last year, which accounts for most but not all of the increase in vacancies posted - existing advertisers have also been sending more job ads. The site now features virtually all the advertised vacancies in UK market research - there are only a few dozen that we can identify in other publications each month that are not definitely on it, and some of these may well be ads which are advertised by recruiters on MrWeb but are not clearly distinguishable as the same ad. The number of ads for all UK executive positions [our general term, however inaccurate, for jobs in JRE, RE, SRE, PM, RM, AD and Director+ roles - and excluding field and IT/DP] posted each month to date in 2003 is as follows: |
