In the past year Bayt.com has launched Bayt.com Salaries, the MENA’s first pan-regional Salaries Calculator and compensation benchmarking tool which also hosts an array of very interesting and dynamic community related features and applications. What this tool does is enable the region’s professionals to analyse market salary levels for their position as well as other positions they may be interested in.
Salaries can be analysed by job title across industries and countries and professionals can hone in on specific top companies that are paying their target salaries. If knowledge is power, the kind of timely and relevant insights the Bayt.com Salaries tool provides is heavily empowering, to say the least.
While repeated HR polls and surveys at Bayt.com show that salaries are only one of many factors jobseekers look at, when making a career move, nevertheless these same polls show they are a very important factor indeed. Moreover a June 2011 poll run by Bayt.com showed that even with the abundance of double-income households in the region (27% of surveyed respondents are from a double-income household ), a very large cross-section of professionals (41% of those surveyed) are not managing to save any of their income at all!
A further 28% of respondents to the same poll maintain they are able to save only 1-20% of their household income; 15% are able to save 21-40% of their income; and 16% are able to save more than that. An overwhelming 51% of respondents, the largest group, said they would only be comfortably able to retire after age 60; and 22% will support their eventual retirement entirely through career savings, with another 28% supporting retirement through a combination of career savings and investments.
Only 10% will rely on social security from the state and a minority 2% will have access to a trust fund or inheritance. Clearly, getting the career compensation equation right is key! A glance at spending habits in the MENA further highlights the importance of adequate compensation planning.
The poll shows that most professionals (32% of those polled) spend 21-40% of their income on rent/mortgage with as many as 22% spending 41-60% on rent/mortgage and 20% spending in the range of 1-20% of income in this category. However a significant 13% of professionals polled spend over 60% of their income in this category.
Most of the region’s respondents, at 67%, don’t own any homes, neither for personal or investment purposes. The same poll moreover shows that the largest non-housing expenditure is food, as claimed by 41% of respondents.
Gaining accurate and timely insights into regional salaries in your industry, and for your desired role, is enabled by the new Bayt.com Salaries platform. This is the first step towards ensuring you are paid right. Complement that key edge with some solid salary negotiation skills and a competitive as well as compelling CV today, and that promotion, career change or early retirement you were eying maybe more attainable than you thought!
