Salary & Rates Publication - November 2010

Arras People launched its quarterly publication exclusively for our clients today. The PPM Insider focuses on an up-to-date picture of the UK's programme and project management sector including salary and day rate data.

With the launch of the new Arras People website and our updated registration process we are now able to collect additional data about salaries, day rates and trends for the UK Programme and Project Management community. The data which we are collecting will be analysed and published in a new quarterly briefing document PPM Insider™ which will be exclusively available to our clients.

This overview is aimed at giving you a flavour of the analysis that we have of the UK Programme and Project Management community. If you would like to receive the quarterly report please sign up here.

Candidate Information
Part of the challenge for any organisation is to understand what is happening in the candidate market. Current market conditions would suggest that there are many candidates available, but are they the right ones for our role? How does this apparent volume translate to quality?

As can be seen in the graph above, October saw candidate volumes increase in terms of both "new" (we have not dealt with them before) and "active" (a combination of new and existing). This increase was due to two key factors;

• Increase in available roles
• Post holiday surge

However further analysis from our internal grading process, which is applied to candidates based upon their PPM skills and experience, shows an interesting trend.

The percentage of "strong candidates" fell as a proportion of those that were active. The number of "weak" candidates increased substantially by the same measure. Overall this surge in activity increased the workload required to find the best candidates for our clients.

Analysis by Role
Whilst general market intelligence is fine, what many organisations can not get to is benchmarked information by individual roles. One of the challenges in project management is the differing interpretation and activities associated with a role title, which is further exaggerated across sector. Our collected data and analysis allows us to review by popular roles and also sector to provide trending information which we believe is not generally available. As a teaser, the data provided below shows part of our analysis for Project Managers. 

Programme Managers
As we can see in the graph above, we have been able to capture and present three elements of data for the registered  candidates who are looking for a permanent role. The first line of data (blue) plots the Current salary of the candidates which we have been banded to allow comparison. This plot reveals a distribution very similar to that found in the 2010 PMBR, though the average is slightly d own from £42,500 to £41,000 for our registered candidates.

The second plot line (red) shows the desired salary which the registering candidates indicated they would like to achieve in their next roles. Not surprisingly, the graph shows that there is still pressure to grow salaries and increase earnings in the lower and mid sectors of the distribution, though it would also appear to suggest that some of the higher earning programme managers are willing to take a decrease in rate to secure a role.

The third plot line (green) shows the salary expectations of contractors if they were to be tempted back into regular permanent PAYE roles. As can be seen there is a significantly shift in the distribution to a higher salary expectation.

The table at right summarises the current salary and current day rates which registering Candidates provided.

The data shows the salary information by the candidates' primary sector and includes the highest rates along with the average.

To see the full report including further candidate analysis, Permanent and Contractor rates and the Max/ Average rates for all the roles please visit the Arras People web site at PPM Insider™, where you can sign up.