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APGA Salary Survey Revamp

By Simon Cook posted 02-21-2019 11:28 AM

  
The APGA Salary Survey has been collected and distributed for over 20 years. It is disseminated annually and alternates each year between surveying the salaries of non-management and management positions. The format of the survey has had little modification since its creation, with the same position titles included in the survey since at least 2000.

In the past few years, participation in the salary survey has been on the decline. For 2018, many of the salary averages for a particular position consisted of limited data points. APGA believes reporting an average with such a low confidence level is a misleading representation of a national average. As a result, APGA has chosen to leave many of the results off of the 2018 summary of survey results.

After internal discussion and consultation with members, APGA believes low participation is due to a number of factors, including: the over-granularity of job positions listed; the requirement to submit a minimum and maximum salary for a position, in addition to the actual salary of the employee; requesting the survey annually; and the perceived lack of value from many APGA members.

Starting in 2019, APGA will be making significant changes to the salary survey that we feel will improve participation, and in turn produce more accurate and meaningful results. These changes are the culmination of many brainstorming sessions between APGA staff and members of the APGA Operations Committee, and with the support of the APGA Executive Committee.

The revamped survey will reduce the number of job titles to minimize confusion, only require the actual salary to be reported, and reduce the number of system size categories from eight to six. The new system size structure will allow for more consistency due to the fact that the gas systems in the new ranges operate in a similar manner, and are believed to be more likely to compensate their employees with similar wages. We will also be conducting the management and non-management surveys concurrently, and will do them biennially rather than annually.

We predict that the changes proposed above will lead to increased participation and provide a more accurate representation of national salary averages of public gas employees. Our goal is to make the salary survey easier to complete and better aligned with its original intent: provide our members with a concise and accurate representation of employee compensation structures for the nation’s public gas systems.

We hope APGA members will find these changes beneficial in the long run and invite you all to participate in August when we solicit participation in the revamped version of the survey!

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