Today's strike....

talksalot81

Mellancholly makes the important point that compares apples for apples. Once completing a phd, an individual will be 26 or older i imagine and the academic route will yield a posdoc at £20k ish. They might be lucky and have an academic posting at 30 at which point they are on the BASE payscale. There then seems to be alot of comparison with oranges and talking about how this is not uncomparable with other professionals. What is neglected is that you are comparing a 30 year old academic's salary with a 22/23yo who went to work straight out of a degree. These 2 just cannot be compared.

It is also worth nothing that although it may look like others are earning enormously more than phd students, we arent that badly off given we have no tax/NI etc to pay. In fact, if you do the sums you may find that the bottom run postdoc ends up getting potentially less than they would have as a phd student on a cast studentship.

ffeindadifyr

At last... sombody talking sense!!! I'm quite tempted to go back and do another PhD! Grants were only 6k a year when I started... these days it pays much better than being a postdoc and you get paid for demonstrating in labs!!

talksalot81

ffeindadifyr wrote:

At last... sombody talking sense!!! I'm quite tempted to go back and do another PhD! Grants were only 6k a year when I started... these days it pays much better than being a postdoc and you get paid for demonstrating in labs!!

Alas I tried to float that one but we didnt think it would get too far! It is £13k tax free next year I think!

exil

Not every lecturer has a PhD - esp. in the post-92 unis. And if you DO have a PhD you don't enter the scale at the bottom.

Clearly lecturing isn't a way to make a million, but is one of the few jobs you can get to 50k or so without becoming a senior manager.

[Deleted User]

50K.. as a lecturer ? You need to become a professor to hit those salaries.

Lets all be realistic. Academia isn't a place where you earn much money. I quit a decent academic role of research assistant (and turned down a Research fellow post) that paid 22K. I had a BSc MSc but no PhD. I was pretty good at my job and had organised and run a lecture before (it's not that easy to do from scratch). I left it for a job in an IT firm where I immediatly gained a 20% payrise, and expect a further 15% rise after my first year at the firm.

So, in one year, by leaving academia, i will have increased my salary 40%. If i'd stayed, i would have recieved 1 grand. I have no doubts that if i stay where I am it won't be too long before I hit 50K. I'm pretty sure I made the right decision.

Simply - lecturers are highly qualified extremely intelligent individuals who aren't paid enough considering their training and expertise. If you don't pay them properly, they will leave. Just like i did.

exil

Top of the senior lecturer scale is actually around 55k - profs earn more than this (average 57k 2 years ago - more like 60k now, AUT figures).

Not many IT jobs pay 50k. About 15% of IT professionals (graduate level) in fact. Software engineers earn (median) £33k, lecturers £37k. IT used to be the place for telephone number salaries - no longer. I know of fellow IT professionals on the dole or stacking shelves.

People leave lecturing, sure. And other people come in to the profession from outside. Granted they aren't likely to do so to get rich, but there are other attractions to the job.

[Deleted User]

Here's some links to lecturer pay scales:

http://www.city.ac.uk/hr/contractual/scaleacademic.html
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/schoolsanddivisions/divisions/humrs/staffinfo/payscales.html
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/salary_scales/academic_research.php
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/images/scalescademic_tcm68-13398.pdf
http://www.aston.ac.uk/staff/hr/infoabout/salaryscales/acadsalscales.jsp
http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/central_departments/humanresources/ic/ss/Aug_05_OC/August_05_Academic_On_Costs.htm
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/staffing/personnl/salary/facscale.pdf

And for a bit of equality, here's a page from a salary monitoring website about the place I work:
http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/cerner.do

We hire a lot of graduates(about 100 in the last 6 months) and I know our basic salary for them is 23K, 26K if they've got a year or two experience from another job and up to 30K in some cases where they've got more relevant background knowledge.

You're friends must have fallen on pretty bad luck to not be employed in IT anymore. If they have an interest in healthcare IT, let me know

exil

Generally they're getting rather long in the tooth and are probably suffering from ageism in the industry! A lot of people who were working on contracts dropped out of IT after the Y2K/internet boom petered out. Computer magazines that once were like doorsteps and crammed with ads suddenly thinned out. And once you've been "out of the loop" for a while it's difficult to get back in.

Glad to hear the IT job market might be picking up again - partner is also looking for a job at the moment!

My figures are based on the ASHE which is calculated on actual average salaries, not salaries in job adverts (which often are rather more than is actually offered when pen is put to paper).

stuwilky

exil wrote:

Top of the senior lecturer scale is actually around 55k - profs earn more than this (average 57k 2 years ago - more like 60k now, AUT figures).

Top of the SL scale is circa £33k, top of the Principal Lecturer scale is circa £45k.

Post 92 Universities payscales.

exil

Though there is a single pay scale, grade structure and how grades map to pay scales now varies a great deal between unis.