People work to get money. Every worker wants a higher salary or pay rate. But there are many strategies for seeking better wages. Some people stay at the same job their whole life, counting on cost-of-living adjustments or seniority-based increases to boost their wages. Some people constantly look for new openings that pay a little more. One person will stay in the same occupational group, while another will cross over, for example, from production to management. One prefers to rise rapidly in a small company, while another climbs the ladder in a large corporation. Some prefer the security of a regular paycheck, while others enjoy the risk and potential of self-employment. Many realize at some point in their career that the road ahead is flat unless they enhance their skill level, so they return to school for a degree or technical certificate. These are all potentially good career strategies. But none of them pays off unless the jobs are there, and unless those jobs pay what the worker hopes to earn.

Success in the job market requires initiative and information. Counselors stress the need for initiative, but the information also is essential. No one can make a good career plan without detailed and accurate knowledge of the rates of pay and number of openings for various specific occupations. Most people know, for example, that doctors and lawyers make a lot of money – but there are few openings. (Lawyers account for just one in 208 jobs nationwide.) Fortunately, there are hundreds of alternative occupations that pay, if not the premium wages of the top professions, enough for security and comfort.

Unfortunately, most sources of labor market information today don’t provide adequate detail. They condense wages into a single number: the median wage. As a statistic, the median is an elegant measure of central tendency. It means something to a statistician, but not to a job seeker. No job seeker cares what the middle is. For that matter, no employer ever said, “I want to pay people the exact middle.” What they do say is, “I want to pay as much as necessary to attract and retain the workers I need to succeed, but not more.”

You might suppose that the median gives a good indication of the distribution. But it doesn’t. Less than 10 percent of the workers in any occupation earn exactly the median wage. Most are making several dollars above or below it. For example, the median for insurance salespeople in Central Indiana is $22.32 an hour. But beginners in that job make only about $10.15 an hour. The top 10 percent of insurance agents – who’ve built a large client base over time – make more than $46.84 an hour. The median is the middle of the range but, as this example shows, it gives no indication of the width of the distribution. It disguises both the modest starting wage and the fantastic potential at the high end.

Show the median wage for an occupation to a young person deciding what kind of work to go into and you’ll cause him to overestimate what he is likely to be paid in his first job. He’ll think in terms of $22 an hour, and may think you lied to him when the first offer he gets is $12 an hour less. But tell it to a mid-career job-changer, and she may not realize that the occupation holds considerable potential over a career.

There was a time when we used the median because there was nothing better. But there also was a time when we used a compass to find our way. Today, many of us have sophisticated and precise global positioning systems in our cars and our cell phones. Most of us are adept at using Mapquest or other mapping tools to get precise directions to any place, and we wouldn’t think of setting out on a trip with no clearer directions than, “Go that way.” Yet people make career decisions every day with only the primitive guidance of the median wage.