Project managers and salary survey results

How much could you make if you went into project management? Bloomberg Businessweek recently published a story titled, "Inside Project Managers' Paychecks: Salary Survey Results." The data is from the Project Management Institute's (PMI) recently released 2009 Project Management Salary Survey.

Here's some interesting data:

The median base salary for a project management professional in the U.S. is $100,000. Three-fourths of survey respondents earn more than $84,000 per year, and one-fourth of survey respondents take home an annual base salary of more than $120,000.

PMI's salary survey also reveals what project management professionals earn according to a variety of variables, including:

* their title
* educational background
* whether they hold a PMP certification (and how long they've held it)
* the department they work in
* their industry
* the type of project they work on (e.g. construction, IT, R&D)
* the average size of their project team and budget
* gender (here we go with the gender-salary gap again!)

If you're curious, you can read the full Bloomberg Businessweek article here.

So how is this information relevant for physicians and other health care professionals who wish to pursue alternative careers? Project management is critical in every industry, but there are some industries where physicians may be expected to have stronger skills in project management. For instance, the health information technology or health IT industry is one particular industry where project management experience is very valuable. What type of experience you do you have managing an electronic health record (EHR) implementation? What about transitioning from paper orders to computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems?

A difference of $3.5 million

There's a great story on Bloomberg Businessweek titled, "For Health Care to Work, These Doctors Need a Big Raise." It starts with this:

Specialists earn $3.5 million more, on average, than general practitioners over the course of a career. A federal panel wants to reduce the discrepancy.

In this story, James Warren writes how a family physician or general internist averages about $160,000 a year, according to the nonprofit Robert Graham Center. A specialist averages $267,000 (seems low to me). That means the generalist will earn about $3.5 million less over a lifetime.

If we do the math (sorry, I can't help it because I went to MIT), we'll see that the difference is $107,000 per year. If we continue to work backwards, we see that to get $3.5 million, the average doctor is working approximately 32.7 years in his or her career. Does that seem right? We must remember that a generalist has a 3-year residency whereas most specialists have a longer residency (anywhere from 3 to 10+ years if we're including fellowships). So, is this calculation accurate?

Increasing demand for professionals

The unemployment rate among professionals dropped from 5.2% in September to 4.7% in October. Watch Marc Cenedella (Founder and CEO of TheLadders.com) on Bloomberg TV discuss the increasing demand for career professionals. Will we see 3.5 million hires this recession? Click here to access the video on YouTube.