The background work for the Employers' Salary Survey started in 2008–2009 when the Employers' Confederation in cooperation with Estonian Centre for Applied Research CentAR and Statistics Estonia carried out a needs and feasibility study for a salary survey.The results showed that employers required fast and detailed salary information, but without majorly labour intensive input. Cooperation options with Statistics Estonia were analysed, but when the follow-on project failed to receive funding it was decided to develop an in-house salary survey product.

Sources for salary information. In addition to the Employers’ Salary Survey, information on salaries is also available from Statistics Estonia and from various surveys carried out by the private sector. Statistics Estonia publishes quarterly and yearly statistical average gross salaries by regions and by economic activities.

Every four years Statistics Estonia also gathers salary data by occupations, but since the data processing is incredibly labour consuming, there is a great time lag between data gathering and publishing.Financial statistics of enterprises from Statistics Estonia provide data about labour costs and labour productivity.Many enterprises participate in consultation company Fontes’ salary survey, which is based on job evaluation and classification into job families, and in Hay Group salary survey, which is also founded on job evaluations.In addition, international consultation company Mercer is entering the Estonian market with its own pay survey. The latter three are commercial surveys.

The aim of the Employers’ Salary Surveyis to provide most up-to-date information about the salary market with the least data submission possible. The survey includes occupations that are more common and that can indicate changes in the market.The survey is carries out twice a year – on April and October salaries – and it is being constantly improved in line with the feedback from employers. We collect data for April and October, as a rule, the least number of irregular and one-off bonuses (e.g. Christmas bonus) and holiday payments are processed in these two months. Our current survey asked for information on additional remunerations and benefits as a ratio from the annual salary fund to gain additional comparative material about other periods. The survey carried out on October salaries provides an opportunity to compare the results with the official statistics both in Estonia and internationally, as statistical offices of many countries collect data about the same period through the structure of earnings surveys.

Participation in the survey is free and so is the final report – this approach allows participation of organisations with relevant occupations, regardless of whether they are interested in paying for the survey or not.

The first Employers’ Salary Survey was conducted in May 2011, on April salaries.Based on the feedback from the first survey, this latest, autumn survey was enhanced.In the spring, there were 10 occupations included in the survey. In the autumn the number was increased to 26. Both surveys have included such occupations as secretaries, accountants, heavy truck and lorry drivers, manufacturing labourers, etc. The occupation selection process took into account employers’ suggestions but the occupations also had to be unambiguous and sufficiently common to receive the critical number of respondents. For this purpose, the number of workers in selected occupations was checked against Statistics Estonia database. The latest data available on numbers of workers by occupations from Statistics Estonia at the time of preparing the survey was from 2007. Bearing in mind the changes that have taken place in the economy since, the figures may not illustrate the current labour market accurately, but they do provide some idea.Based on the experience from the spring survey, this survey includes different grades within some occupations, for example, secretaries and accountants.

The spring survey contained a short job description for each occupation and these were linked to consultation company Fontes' salary survey classification of jobs into families and levels, to Statistics Estonia classification of occupations (ISCO) and to occupational standards if they existedThe autumn survey is based on the new International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008v1.5b (ISCO), which in the opinion of the survey team is more up-to-date and reflects the hierarchy of occupations better. The surveyed occupations are listed in Appendix 1.  

The survey asked for average salaries paid in October 2011 for full-time jobs in selected occupations.No person-based data was collected.In preparing the survey methodology in consultation with employers it was concluded that it is easier for a person who deals with salaries on a daily basis to give an assessment or calculate the average of an occupation rather than enter person-based data for up to hundreds of employees. 

Person-based data collection would significantly increase the volume of data and the probability of input errors, which all in all would extend the data processing time considerably.The decision not to collect person-based data limits the number of analyses we can make, e.g. calculating medians and percentiles, but these are aspects already covered by Statistics Estonia and commercially conducted surveys.

The population of the Employers' Salary Survey is formed by organisations that employ representatives of the selected occupations. There are no official statistics published about this. There is the earnings survey from 2007 by Statistics Estonia, which provides data on numbers of employees, but fails to include background information on companies.

In preparation for the survey, a database was created with organisations' contact and background data, where organisations were selected to by number of employees, economic activity and location. Extended samples were taken from larger companies on the assumption that they were more likely to employ selected occupations. More samples were also drawn from the construction and manufacturing sectors and from the area of transport & storage as the selection contained occupations from these specific areas.In addition to official registers, the background data and contact details of organisations were checked through public channels and companies that had ceased trading were excluded. The survey excluded local governments and their subunits, as their data are publicly available and comparability of roles may have also caused issues. Another group we excluded was non-profit associations due to the same possible issue of role comparability.

Approximately 2,000 organisations were invited to take part, first by email and then by phone. The organisations were given an opportunity to complete a participation request, which asked for the basic background information, such as economic activity, number of employees, commercial registry code. Once the submitted data was checked, the company was allocated a unique web address for completing the survey questionnaire. 

The survey was conducted online with the help of free software LimeSurvey, which was integrated into the Employers' website.The questionnaires could be completed either in Estonian or in Russian. Compared to the spring survey, the autumn questionnaire was simplified and shortened.The first part of the questionnaire asked for organisations’ background information and thereafter the respondents could choose which occupations they wanted to participate in the survey with. A detailed description of each occupation, excerpted from ISCO, was made available to all respondents. On request, the respondents were advised over the phone or by email.

The Employers' Confederation would like to thank everybody who helped to prepare and conduct the survey and especially the respondents!The survey methodology was developed in cooperation with TNS Emor and the Estonian Centre for Applied Research CentAR.Survey groundwork was carried out by Lahemaa Teleworking and Training Centre employees.