How Much Do I Earn?

Many colleagues are teaching labour market economics around this time of year! Accessing up to date information on mean and median salaries for different occupations can open up all kinds of interesting discussions and starter activities. We did one of these at the TeachECON events last autumn involving a starter called How Much Do I Earn?

The resource uses 24 different occupations distributed to students at the start of a lesson. Students are then asked to think about how much a particular job might pay and where they might stand in a distribution of annual earnings within the group - there are 24 jobs so you can pick and choose which ones to use!

The data is for gross median earnings for each occupation - earnings can be supplemented by overtime, productivity bonuses and other increments to basic pay.

I usually award a prize to the student who is nearest to estimating their chosen salary as they find their place in the group. And this starter provides a good way of getting into group discussions about why some jobs pay well above and othes pay well below the median income.

It gives students a better awareness of relative pay rates and some good examples to use in essays that might otherwise be a bit too theoretical in approach.

Download the resources here:

PDF version
How_Much_Do_You_Earn.pdf

PowerPoint / IWB Version
How_much_do_you_earn.pptx

My Salary is a useful website for students who want to find out more about different wages and earnings in the labour market. My salary contains average salary data, relative to your job, with a huge range of literally thousands of job titles and industry sectors with real salary data for each. It will let you know how your full time salary compares to the market average salary for your job sector. Here is the link.