New Economy Compensation

This course examines the differences between compensation programs of old economy and new economy organizations. Their different use of compensation elements (including base salaries, incentives and employee benefits) is discussed. At the end of this course, you should understand the basics of compensation planning, and how your organization can better use its resources to attract and retain talent.

Analyzing Salary Surveys

Accurate salary survey data is crucial to salary increase planning. There are many options for obtaining salary survey data: government salary surveys, online salary surveys, a salary survey research outsource, private salary surveys, or conducting your own survey. This course explores the advantages of each of these options and shows you how to conduct your own salary survey. Finally, this course illustrates how to incorporate salary survey data into wage decisions.

Creating a Competitive Salary Structure

This course focuses on the development of a single competitive salary structure for a single labor market, with the goal of allowing a company to achieve competitive salary levels with a comparison competitive group of companies. It shows you how to create this structure using all jobs within the organization or only benchmark jobs. Then it explains how to audit and maintain this structure over time.

Designing a Branch Office Salary Structure

This course takes you through the process of establishing a branch-office salary structure. You’ll learn how to determine whether your company can apply its headquarters’ structure directly to the branch office, adjust the headquarters’ structure, or develop a new structure entirely. Geographic salary and cost-of-living levels are discussed since they apply to the salary-structure decision. Then branch-office structures for major U.S. cities and suburbs are analyzed. Canadian and international structures are also covered.

Creating a Competitive Salary Assessment

Determining salary ranges is a complicated task. This course discusses the importance of setting and administering equitable salary structures. We also analyze the differences between merit and automatic progression, and focus special attention on the challenges that compensation managers must face, including: the labor market, retention, unions and the impact of free Internet salary information.

Installing Job Evaluation in Your Organization

While growing in importance worldwide, job evaluation is losing ground in the United States. Some U.S. compensation specialists now rely almost entirely on "what the market pays" when setting salaries. This course reviews the history of job evaluation and shows where it still holds great importance in the fight against pay discrimination. We will guide you through the steps of job evaluation, where jobs are classified based on their duties and importance. Upon completion of this course, you will be ready to launch a job evaluation program in your own organization.

Sales Compensation and Expense Allowances

This course discusses the creation of sales compensation plans. It describes the steps you must take to set a plan up, including setting goals, choosing measures, and establishing formulas. Then it discusses how to evaluate the success of the plan. Finally, this course looks at special sales compensation, including travel allowances and expense accounts.

Determining an Expatriate's Compensation

This course teaches you how to set compensation for employees being sent on foreign assignments. It covers how to choose employees for such assignments, how to compensate them with a series of allowances, and how to tax equalize their compensation. Keeping the employee whole is stressed, since he or she should not be penalized financially for accepting an overseas assignment.

Quantitative Methods Used in Executive Compensation

This course introduces you to various statistical methods used in setting, analyzing, and auditing executive compensation. Key to this course is the application of distributions and logarithms in analyzing survey data. This course also teaches you how to use financial ratios and multiple regression to set pay. Then it covers the equations needed to explain deferred compensation and stock options. Finally, this course will show you how to use research software in order to determine maximum reasonable compensation for executives.