Produce a one-page market sheet for one role, with a salary range, the top skills and the main employers.
Collect your notes from the last three lessons and put them in front of you before you read on. You probably have them in four places: a salary range from the wage tables, a salary range from a recruiter guide, a tally of skills from twenty ads, and a list of employers. Each set is useful. Spread across a notebook, a browser and your phone, though, they are hard to use at the moments you need them, such as the night before an interview or when a recruiter asks what you expect to be paid.
A market sheet pulls all of it onto one page. It is a single page for one target role showing what it pays, what it asks for, who hires for it and where you stand today. You'll build one for your first-choice role, and ideally a second.
The worked example throughout is Wei Ling's sheet for supply chain data analyst. Every figure in it is made up for illustration, so do not read any of them as real salaries.
Write the role name at the top, with the date next to it. The date goes there because salaries and demand move, and when you pick the sheet up later you need to know how old the figures are. You'll refresh the sheet once a year in module 9.
Below that, make four sections: salary, top skills, main employers, and where you sit. Keep the whole thing to one page. If it spills over, you have copied in too much detail from your notes, and the extra detail can stay in your notebook.
Start by writing down each salary range you found in lesson 2.1, Where to find salary data you can trust, with its source and the date you checked it. From these you'll set three figures for the role at the level you are aiming for: low, typical and high.
Where you have several listings, work out the median. The median, as used here, is the middle value. With ten figures, it is the average of the fifth and sixth.
Wei Ling noted the bottom and top of the salary range in ten MyCareersFuture listings. Sorted from lowest to highest, the bottoms were S$3,500, S$3,800, S$3,800, S$4,000, S$4,000, S$4,200, S$4,200, S$4,500, S$4,500 and S$5,000. The fifth is S$4,000 and the sixth is S$4,200, so the median bottom is S$4,100. She did the same with the tops of the ranges and got a median top of S$5,350. She also took the midpoint of each listing's range, and the median of those ten midpoints was S$4,725.
She then added two more sources. MOM's Occupational Wage Tables gave a median gross wage of S$4,600 for the occupation. A recruiter guide gave a junior band of S$5,000 to S$6,500.
Her low figure is S$4,100, the median bottom of the live listings, because that is what a typical employer would open with. Her typical figure is S$4,700, because the wage table median of S$4,600 and the listings' median midpoint of S$4,725 sat close together. Her high figure is S$5,400, rounded from the median top of S$5,350. She noted the recruiter guide separately as "upper market, may tilt high", for the reasons covered in lesson 2.1.
Next to each figure she wrote its source. Copy that habit, so that anyone looking at the sheet, including you in six months, can see where a number came from.
From your tally in lesson 2.2, Read job ads like a recruiter, copy the ten most frequent skills with the count next to each. Wei Ling's list from twenty ads reads: SQL 18, Excel 17, explaining findings to non-technical teams 15, Power BI or Tableau 14, supply chain or logistics knowledge 11, data cleaning 10, ERP systems such as SAP 9, forecasting 8, Python 7, and project coordination 6.
The counts tell you more than the order. A skill that appears in 18 of 20 ads, like SQL, is close to a must-have. A skill that appears in 6 of 20, like project coordination, is something to mention if you have it and skip if you do not.
Then copy the ten employers from lesson 2.3, Who is hiring, and how to tell if it lasts. Add a column for the level each one hires at (entry, mid or senior) and a column for the route to reach each one. Leave the route column blank for now. You'll fill it in during module 5 with direct application, recruiter or referral. If most of your employers hire at mid level and you are switching careers, move the few that take entry-level or junior candidates to the top of your list.
The last section is one honest sentence comparing you with the role today. It is the most useful line on the page: it tells you what to learn next and which ads to apply for now, and it will make your CV work in module 3 much faster.
Wei Ling wrote: "I have Excel, supply chain knowledge, experience explaining findings and project coordination, I am learning SQL and have not used Power BI or Tableau at work, so I fit mid-level roles in logistics firms once SQL is done, and entry-level analyst roles elsewhere today." Write yours the same way, using your skills list to check what you have, what you are learning and what you have not done yet.
When you finish, check that your sheet has:
the role and the date low, typical and high salary, with a source for each ten skills with counts ten employers with levels your sentence on where you sit
Now build the sheet for your first-choice direction, carefully. If you have time, do a second one for your next direction, because comparing two sheets side by side often settles which one to pursue.
Fill in the market sheet for your first-choice direction. If you have time, do the same for your second.
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