Host: How can I get salary data?

Karen James Chopra: There are a number of places that you can find information on salary. One, you can ask people who are in the field. They generally have a pretty good idea of what the ballpark is and so you can just ask them what should I be looking at for this particular position. You can look at want ads that are posted online. Some of them will have salaries listed in the want ads and that will help give you a ballpark. There are also salary surveys that are available but normally they are quite costly. So be very careful before you choose to pay for salary information. You can also use online chat groups or List-servs and sometimes you can throw out a question saying, "What's the salary range for this particular position?

" You get some data there. Often times, the company doesn't list the salary for the job that they are posting and so you are not going to get any information from the company whatsoever officially, but if you have got good networking contacts and can get to somebody inside the company, they can also give you a pretty good idea of what the position is going to pay. Finally, if you are working for a non-profit or looking to work for a non-profit organization, you can get a ballpark of what you might be expecting in this position simply by looking at their 990. The 990 is their tax return and for non-profit organizations that has to be made public. So you can find these on the web and the 990 will list the top five salaries within the corporation. What that tells you is if the Executive Director is 150,000 then it is possible that you might be able to get 90,000 or 110,000 for a VP position. So if the Executive Director is only making 90,000 then you can expect that your position is going to pay significantly less than that. So for non-profits, that's a good way of getting a sense of what the ballpark is going to be for your position.