Updated salary data!

If you're a soon-to-be university graduate entering the workforce in Canada, you might be wondering how much salary you can expect to earn.  Our ongoing research suggests that you are probably over-estimating the salary that you are likely to earn in your first year.  To help you out, here are some data from the March 2011 Labour Force Survey.  The salaries given are the usual salaries of full-time employed Canadians aged 22-24 who have a university bachelor's degree. (data courtesy of Statistics Canada).

	Male	Female
Newfoundland	$40,932.70	$24,574.42
Prince Edward Island	$29,120.00	$30,081.25
Nova Scotia	$29,044.40	$33,047.14
New Brunswick	$35,974.17	$30,056.92
Québec	$44,346.07	$38,819.74
Ontario	$41,826.09	$36,448.27
Manitoba	$39,107.71	$31,111.84
Saskatchewan	$36,883.54	$40,561.91
Alberta	$39,736.67	$42,052.49
British Columbia	$28,634.54	$29,470.01

If you happen to live in one of the big 3 cities, you'll fare a bit better in general:

	Male	Female
Montreal	$42,391.73	$38,785.78
Toronto	$47,937.46	$35,646.61
Vancouver	$31,069.45	$30,496.87
Other CMA or Non-CMA	$37,409.02	$37,188.21

Salary expectations

We got quite a bit of press regarding our recent article in the Journal of Business and Psychology

The comments that were posted by viewers of the news story were very interesting. One of the things that is clear is that there are some people who think we are lying about the salaries of young university grads. We thought we'd post some salary data based on the January 2009 Labour Force Survey from Statistics Canada. Below are the average salaries for full-time employed Canadian university graduates by age band.

Age	Average Salary
15 to 19	$ 24,906.86
20 to 24	$ 32,812.88
25 to 29	$ 44,735.33
30 to 34	$ 51,061.21
35 to 39	$ 54,371.76
40 to 44	$ 55,717.31
45 to 49	$ 58,584.66
50 to 54	$ 58,607.87
55 to 59	$ 57,126.13
60 to 64	$ 55,606.74
65 to 69	$ 47,590.48
70+	$ 56,123.41

To add further context, a Canadian earning $100,000 would be in the 96th percentile of Canadian earners, and a person earning $70,000 (the average salary expectation in our study after 5 years of career work) would be in the 83rd percentile. The 50th percentile (i.e., the median) salary is about $48,000.

If you're curious about how recent university grads fare depending on their occupation, here is that breakdown for ages 20-29.

	20 to 24	25 to 29
Senior Management	.	$ 29,029.00
Other Management	$ 33,432.88	$ 58,610.65
Prof-Business/Finance	$ 46,058.78	$ 49,980.13
Finan/Secret/Administ	$ 29,504.34	$ 41,634.56
Clerical/Supervisors	$ 28,697.27	$ 35,257.00
Natural/Appl Sciences	$ 37,155.29	$ 54,470.63
Prof-Health/Nurse/RNs	$ 44,314.34	$ 57,463.18
Tech/Assisting/Health	$ 34,295.81	$ 39,519.43
S.Science/Govt/Relig	$ 32,466.92	$ 43,247.00
Teachers & Professors	$ 37,594.93	$ 43,304.40
Art/Culture/Rec/Sport	$ 33,594.64	$ 47,226.22
Wholesale/Tech/Insur	$ 28,989.57	$ 40,566.47
Retail/Sales/Cashiers	$ 22,013.09	$ 32,066.66
Chefs/Cooks/Food/Bev	$ 24,250.17	$ 28,053.88
Protective Services	$ 34,047.52	$ 51,413.84
Childcare/Home Supp	$ 27,791.29	$ 29,103.89
Sales/Service/Travel	$ 23,364.17	$ 28,277.85
Contractors/Supervisor	$ 51,350.14	$ 55,632.33
Construction Trades	$ 39,563.32	$ 46,081.62
Other Trades	$ 39,267.76	$ 52,155.71
Transport/Equipment	$ 42,019.71	$ 44,861.27
Trades Helpers/Constr	$ 32,068.61	$ 33,915.53
Primary Industry	$ 46,795.97	$ 52,239.61
Machine Ops/Assemblers	$ 31,242.07	$ 42,311.14
Process/Manuf/Utility	$ 25,149.72	$ 31,884.95

Great Expectations

The GenCareerShift team recently published an article in the Journal of Business and Psychology that details our findings from a recent study (partering with D~code). The results show that recent university graduates had reasonable expectations for their starting salaries (about $43,000), but they expected a 62% pay increase within the first 5 years on the job (up to $70,000). Also, almost 70% of respondents expected to be promoted within the first 18 months of starting their first career job.

Since our data were collected in 2007, the natural question is whether a hard economy has attenuated the expectations of young workers. Evidence from another study, conducted by Sara De Hauw and Ans De Vos in Belgium shows that graduating students' expectations about pay, training, career development and work-life balance did not change between 2006 and 2009, but they did lower their optimism and their expectations for a social work environment and job security.

Generation What?

The term "Millennials" has been picking up steam as an alternative to the label "Generation Y." This makes a bit of sense, since Gen Y is merely a weak reference to "Generation X," a label that was popularized by Douglas Coupland's 1991 book with that title. It was poor form to just continue on labelling generational cohorts alphabetically, starting with X...you see how limiting that would be.

The term Millennials was popularized by American researchers William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their 2000 book Millennials Rising. Howe and Strauss were of the opinion that the Millennials would be the 'next great generation,' and that they ushered in the dawn of a new millennial age. We can maybe forgive Howe and Strauss for their romanticism, since this generation was made up of teenagers when the book was written, and we were all still relative newbies on the Internet. Well, a decade later, (a decade that brought us YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, among other things), the moniker 'Millennials' seems a bit dated.

Now that the people of this cohort have largely entered adulthood (if age 18 is an adult these days) and we have a clearer picture of the cohort's characteristics, it's maybe time for a more appropriate name. Here are some of the ideas that have been suggested:

• Generation Me
• The Net Generation
• The Entitled Generation
• The Trophy Generation
• The Myspace/Facebook Generation
• The Peter Pan Generation
• The "Special Me" Generation

None of these seem to really capture the essence. The question is open...what do we call these people? (...and "we refuse to be labelled" is not a valid answer).