IPIC has improved occupational wage information for Central Indiana by creating a series of “wage curves.” Each curve depicts the range and frequency of wage earners in our region at every dollar level from the bottom to the top of the range.⁶ If that sounds like mumbo-jumbo, don’t worry. The display is an easy-to-understand picture.

Source: STATS Indiana and the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis

An employer asked IPIC not long ago about the wages for a certain type of skilled craftsman. This employer wanted to attract and retain the very best workers in the trade, so the median wage wasn’t useful. He didn’t want average workers. The wage curve showed him where the top of the range lies, which was what he wanted to know. The curve can tell any employer the same kind of useful information, whether his strategy is to keep wages low or to pay what is necessary to minimize turnover and retraining costs.

A worker in mid-career can learn from the wage curve, too. She knows what she is making now, and probably what others at her company are making. But she probably doesn’t have much of an idea of the full range of pay for her occupation and other, related occupations throughout the region. Chances are she has heard what other people earn. But there’s no certainty that what she has heard is realistic or representative. The wage curve shows the pay levels as they really are. If she finds that her current wage is at the low end of the range for her occupation, she may choose to stay with it, since many similar jobs in the region pay more than her current job does. But if she is already near the high end of the occupation’s wage range, she shouldn’t expect much more from her current employer or any other. If she wants more money, she’ll have to get training and prepare for a different occupation with a different wage curve.

We present a wage curve for the entire Central Indiana labor market in this section. Similar graphs for 21 occupational groups will be forthcoming in the next iteration of IPIC’s labor market studies.

6 To create the wage curve, we made a spreadsheet with a column for every dollar level from $6 an hour to $50 an hour, and a row for each of 600 occupations. In each of those 27,000 cells, we prorated the number of workers earning at each dollar level along that range for each occupation. The source data are gathered and published by the Indiana Department of Workforce Development and are located at www.hoosierdata.in.gov. The method is experimental, and has at least three specific areas of imprecision. First, not all employers report to the DWD. Professional sports teams, for example, do not. So the number of workers in “Arts, design and entertainment” occupations is too small and excludes several dozen individuals with extremely high incomes. Second, information for teachers is not gathered by DWD, and estimates of the range of teacher salaries are based on an alternative source. Third, the information supplied by DWD provides values at the 10th and 90th percentiles. It is known that 10 percent of all workers earn below the 10th percentile, but not how far below. Likewise, 10 percent of all workers in the occupation earn above the 90th percentile, but it isn’t known how far above that mark the top earners stretch. These extremes have been estimated.