taken from salary.sg
for those seeking to enhance themselves or looking out for new industries to try out

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Jobs with fastest increasing pay
August 11th, 2007

Ever wondered which jobs give the highest “growth” in their wages? In this post, I produce (yet another) ranking table for 30 jobs with the highest increments.

Some background first.

I analysed the wage data from the Report on Wages in Singapore 2006 and found that specialised surgeons, risk management managers and advertising copywriters get the highest increase in their pay over the years.

Specifically, I looked at the median wage data of managers and professionals of 8 age groups. What I did was equivalent to plotting a graph of wage against age for a particular job, getting the best fitted straight line using least squares method, and calculating the slope of that line. (Obviously, I did not do all these manually. I used Excel.)

The results. Specialised surgeons get an average increment of $530 per year, over 40 years. That is an increment of $21,200!

For risk management managers, it’s $416 per year. And for advertising copywriters, it’s $325 per year.

But note that data for advertising copywriters aged 40 and above is not available. Ditto for risk management managers aged 50 and above.

Here’s the ranking table:

Specialised surgeon - $530/yr
Risk management manager - $416/yr
Advertising copywriter - $325/yr
Chemist - $324/yr
Credit analyst - $285/yr
General Manager - $250/yr
Business management consultant - $210/yr
Food and drink technologist - $194/yr
Training manager - $185/yr
Corporate planning manager - $179/yr
Biologist - $177/yr
Legal officer - $171/yr
Building architect - $155/yr
Computer and information systems manager - $150/yr
Power generation and distribution engineer - $148/yr
Business development manager - $143/yr
Computer operations and network manager - $142/yr
Research and development manager - $141/yr
Aeronautical engineer - $140/yr
Business analyst - $137/yr
Operations manager (Finance) - $136/yr
Chemical engineer (Petroleum) - $135/yr
Advocate and solicitor - $131/yr
Medical social worker - $129/yr
Company director - $128/yr
Computer engineer - $128/yr
Managing director - $127/yr
General physician - $126/yr
Engineering manager - $121/yr
Industrial health, safety and environment engineer - $118/yr

AND

According to my findings, the top industry for managers is, not surprisingly, financial services. The following are the industries ranked by average gross wage for managers (highest shown first):

Financial services - $9,682
Professional services - $8,870
Information & communications (infocomm) - $8,699
Education health & social services - $7,258
Transport & storage - $7,162
Manufacturing - $7,141
Wholesale & retail trade - $7,004
Real estate & leasing services - $6,504
Construction - $5,496
Administrative & support services - $5,398
Arts entertainment recreation & other services - $5,186
Hotels & restaurants - $3,971

As for professionals (who earn much less than managers), the top industry is education, health & social services, with financial services following closely at 2nd spot. The following is the ranking table for average gross wage for professionals:

Education health & social services - $6,508
Financial services - $5,343
Transport & storage - $5,085
Professional services - $4,492
Information & communications (infocomm) - $4,417
Wholesale & retail trade - $4,351
Manufacturing - $4,153
Real estate & leasing services - $3,753
Arts entertainment recreation & other services - $3,548
Administrative & support services - $3,489
Hotels & restaurants - $3,322
Construction - $3,237

So, maybe a good strategy is to start as a professional in the financial services industry, and then move up to become a manager.

Another good industry is perhaps education, health & social services, but it’s not clear exactly which of education, health or social service pays the best.

I say, stick to financial services. If you have a choice.