The Project Management Institute's Project Management Salary Survey for 2009 was recently published and is now available for purchase at the PMI Web site.[1] The survey, "based on self-reported data from 35,000 project management professionals" from 19 countries, measures "salaries across eight major position description levels" and includes a number of key demographics, including work experience, PMP status, industry, department/function, and highest formal education level obtained. What, if anything, does it have to tell legal-project managers about their earning potential?
For this post I only looked at the Salary Survey Country Report for the United States. The U.S. Report draws upon data from 19,916 respondents.[2] Of the eight positions the survey measures, the three that I feel are most relevant to the typical legal-project manager are: Project Manager I, Project Manager II, and Project Manager III. I don't think that legal project management is mature enough to have a statistically significant number of respondents who are program or portfolio managers, PMO directors, or Project Management Consultants, dedicated to managing legal projects. Similarly, I exclude from consideration the "project management specialist" position, which is described as: "Responsible for a specific area of project management (i.e.,scheduling, cost management, risk management, etc.). Supports the Project Manager and their associated projects."[3] It is rare to find staff dedicated solely to project management in the legal environment, much less "a specific area of project management."
The legal project managers that this salary data is likely to be most relevant to are:
- project managers in litigation support bureaus / e-discovery service providers;
- project managers in large law firm litigation support departments; and
- project managers dedicated to legal support/e-discovery in corporate legal or IT departments
The most applicable job descriptions in the survey to these positions is that of "project manager." At level I, a project manager works "[u]nder direct supervision of a more senior project manager, ...oversees a small project or phase(s) of a larger project", and has "[r]esponsibility for all aspects of the project over the entire project life...." At level II, the project manager has more responsibility "for assembling the team, assigning individual responsibilities, identifying appropriate resources needed, and developing [the] schedule to ensure timely completion of project". At level III, the project manager oversees high-level projects, "take[s] projects from original concept through final implementation, [and] [i]nterfaces with all areas affected by the project including end users, distributors, and vendors."
[4] Because the legal industry is somewhat unique, I think that much of the data aggregated from across all industries is not particularly relevant to LPMs. The demographics that did strike me as useful include:
Annualized salary by department. Unfortunately, "legal department" was not given as an option. The median and mean salaries for those department categories that LPMs would likely have selected are:
- Consulting: median = 115,500 USD, mean=$119,890;
- Information Technology/Information Systems: median = 100,000 USD, mean = $103,187; or
- Other: 98,000 USD; 101,396 USD
Annualized salary by industry. The survey did provide "legal" as an industry category. For those respondents who selected "legal" as the industry in which they practiced project management, the median annual salary was 90,500 USD, the mean salary was 96,373 USD, and 75% of these respondents made over 79,377 USD per year.
Annulaized by type of project.The only category of project that seems specifically relevant to legal project management ("information technology," "operations," and "other" being too broad to draw conclusions regarding LPM) is "Regulatory Compliance." Those respondents stating that the projects they manage related primarily to regulatory compliance reported earning a median annual salary of 100,000 USD and a mean annual salary of 104,667 USD.
One statistic that I found interesting is that Project Managers levels I through III report working 40-48 hours per week. I would expect (based entirely on anecdotal evidence) this number to be higher for legal project managers.
Another finding I found interesting was that while having a PMP correlates to a higher salary, having a PM Degree makes almost no difference at all in salary.
This blog has discussed
the value of the PMP credential in the past, so I also ran searches using the
Self-directed Online Salary Survey Query,
[5] available free to PMI members, to see if Project Managers with PMPs make more than those without PMPs (the printed survey only compares PMP and non-PMP for all respondents, without breaking the data out by position). The Online Query does not, however, allow you to break results by industry or project type, so whether the PMP certificate adds as much value to legal project managers as project managers in other industries can't be determined from the data as presented.
Project Managers with PMPs make more, in general, than project managers without PMPs, although the the impact of the PMP on salary is reduced with experience/authority. Project Managers I with PMPs earn, on average 14% over those without PMPs, which drops down to a 9% salary advantage for level two, and 8% for level III. It is important to note that the survey was sent to PMI members (actually they use the word "customers," so it may include non-members who've purchased items from the PMI Marketplace). Assuming that higher-earning project managers that join PMI may be more likely to have obtained a PMP, the PMP vs. non-PMP salary gap may not be representative of all project managers. It would be interesting to see a survey that sought to identify project managers independent of (or in addition to) PMI membership/customer lists, to see how the value of the PMP holds up when a large sample of non-PMI members are included.
For more coverage on the PMI Salary Survey, see:
- Brian Crawford's recent post on his entangled.com blog.[8]
- Meredith Levinson discusses the survey in an article for CIO, which provides the numbers for many more of the demographics, such as gender and years of experience.[9]
[1] Project Management Institute, PMI Project Management Salary Survey: United States Country Report (6th Ed. 2009), available for purchase at http://www.pmi.org/Resources/Pages/Members/Project-Management-Salary-Survey.aspx (last visited May 7, 2010).
[2] Id. at 2.
[3] Id. at 14.
[4] Id. at 13-14.
[5] Paul C. Easton, PMP = Promotion, More Pay?, Legal Project Management, May 6, 2010, http://legalprojectmanagement.info/2010/05/pmp-promotion-more-pay.html (last visited May 8, 2010).
[6] Project Management Institute, Self-directed Online Salary Survey, http://www.periscopeiq.com/pmisal2009/default.aspx (requires membership, last visited May 7, 2010).
[7] Larry Dignan, IT Salary Survey: Not All Technical Certs Created Equal, ZDNET - Between the Lines, Mar. 6, 2008 (last visited May 9, 2010).
[8] Brian Crawford, Highlights From the PMI Project Management Salary Survey, Entangled.com, Apr. 9, 2010, http://entangled.com/2010/04/09/highlights-from-the-pmi-project-management-salary-survey/ (last visited May 9, 2010).
[9] Meridith Levinson, Inside Project Managers' Paychecks: PMI Salary Survey Results, CIO, Apr. 22, 2010, http://www.cio.com/article/591699/Inside_Project_Managers_Paychecks_PMI_Salary_Survey_Results?page=2&taxonomyId=3123 (last visited May 9, 2010).
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