Financial Services Pay Highest

In my previous post, I highlighted that the services sector is surging ahead in terms of employment growth. In this post, I will show the salary data for the various industries within the services sector.

The data come from the just released Monthly Digest of Statistics published by the Department of Statistics.

In particular, I used the average monthly nominal earnings per employee, and calculated & ranked the averages for the 4 latest quarters (from 2006 Q3 to 2007 Q2).

Singstat says that the nominal earnings are "computed using data from the CPF Board" and include "bonuses... but exclude employers' CPF contributions."

For those who doubt that CPF knows your monthly pay, rest assured that your employer is required (by law) to submit your wage info to CPF Board.

My findings. The Financial Services industry has an average monthly earning of $6,565, which is more than $1.6k higher than the next best industry, the Information & Communications industry ($4,891). The worst is Hotels & Restaurants at $1,413.

There's also a bump in the 2007 Q1 data for Financial Services (i.e. the $8,227 figure). I believe this can be attributed to the fat bonuses that bankers and VPs got at the beginning of the year.



http://www.salary.sg/2007/financial-...s-pay-highest/

Any idea what is the median wage for each industry?

at82, I haven't come across such data. But my guess is that the median is usually lower than the average (which is often skewed by stratospheric outliers).

Does this take into account bonuses?

ugene, yes bonuses are taken into account. The "nominal earnings" are taken from CPF data and include bonuses.

I've always felt that the statistical figures for financial services sector were grossly misrepresented, simply because I presume that the main contributory factor in elevating the wage figues in finance sector came from sales of financial products, which in my opinion, should be classified under a different category as opposed to finance. Just like the wages of an accountant/FX dealer in a construction/commodities firm do not fall under the categories of construction and manufacturing sectors, sales of investment products should not be classified under the financial sector. No offence to the 'front office' personnel since they're the ones bringing in the 'dough', but such misrepresentation does not truly reflect the situation in the finance industry for those engaged in real financial work, not sales.

kris, are you very sure the figures are skewed only by the sales people?