Useful tools for consultants to use in order to better understand consulting industry compensation.
Various salary benchmarking publications are available within the consulting field. Some tools are formal surveys published annually, other resources are rankings of salaries by firm and assorted others are crowdsourced or even government resources. Read more to see a curated list of benchmarking reports and other useful tools.
Available Consultant Salary Benchmarking Reports
Some of the most noted benchmarking reports for consultant compensation are the publications of Charles Aris Inc. and Management Consulted. Charles Aris Inc., an executive recruiting firm, publishes an annual consultant compensation report. The 2016 edition contains data gleaned from communicating with over 3,500 strategy consultants from nine firms. The report provides various charts regarding consultants’ base-plus-bonus compensation. In addition to helpful graphics, the report also contains analysis about the overall environment and trends of salary levels.
Another publisher of consultant salary surveys is Management Consulted. This firm provides an online information portal for consultants, whereby one of their offerings is a salary survey. Their salary survey posting for 2016 is based on the online communications with their consultant subscribers. Examples of compensation reported include average first-year MBA consultant salary, average senior partner salary and individual firms’ average salaries, from companies such as Accenture, BCG and Deloitte. Sign-on bonuses, relocation bonuses and even retirement match data are also detailed on the website.
For British consultants, the website, Top Consultant, provides a biannual salary benchmarking publication. Their 2015 report contains information on base salaries, bonuses and other benefits from the top consultancies. The report is based on a survey of over 500 consultants. One particularly interesting feature of this report is that it offers comparative historic salaries for a given job role like junior consultant or partner, showing what the role was compensated in 2013 versus 2015.
The goal of benchmarking consultants’ salaries even has an ongoing, active crowdsourcing initiative. Emolument, a crowdsourced initiative for pay data, offers a report for strategy consulting compensation. Nearly 2,000 consultants have provided their salary data to this effort, and the website provides average salaries for London-based and U.S.-based strategy consultants. Additionally, they also profile individual consultancies and their average pay. Their profile for McKinsey & Company provides the average salary plus bonus of consultants as well as the average salary by country.
Vault.com, based on consultant surveys, offers a ranking of the highest paying consulting firms. Top firms include Bain & Company, Cornerstone Research and ClearView Healthcare Partners. Parts of the survey are premium content, and a subscription is needed to view those areas.
Internet Tools for Consulting Salary Data
The Internet has various research tools that provide estimated salary analysis. Such resources include PayScale, Glassdoor, Wall Street Oasis and the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. PayScale is a resource that provides career data for online viewers. For their management consultant profile, they provide compensation data from thousands of consultants and also offer other added value data like the demographics of the profession and potential career paths. Glassdoor provides snapshots of the work environment of various companies. Based on data input by thousands of employees, this resource also provides aggregate estimates of salaries. For their consultant salary overview, their compensation estimates are based on nearly 40,000 salary records. For Wall Street Oasis, the compensation data is based on crowdsourced data from consultants. For access to the data, a subscription is needed and/or a consultant must add his/her own compensation data to the effort. Finally, the standard U.S. government reporting body for salaries is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They offer a handy chart of hourly and annual salary averages for an assortment of consulting roles.
Conclusion
A substantive number of current resources provide consultant salary benchmarks. Various salary estimator tools are also available on the Internet. By using the breadth of publications and tools that are available, a consultant or manager may be able to better determine established compensation levels within the consulting profession.
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