You will produce a one-page market sheet with salary range, top skills and main employers for one role.
After the last three lessons you probably have notes in four places: a salary range from the wage tables, another from a recruiter guide, a tally of skills from twenty ads and a list of employers. Each is useful. Scattered across a notebook, a browser and a phone, they are hard to use when you need them, such as the night before an interview or the moment a recruiter asks what you expect.
This exercise pulls it all onto one page. A market sheet is a single page for one target role that shows what it pays, what it asks for, who hires for it and where you stand today. Wei Ling's sheet for supply chain data analyst is the worked example. Every figure in it is made up for illustration, so do not read them as real salaries.
Put the role name at the top, with the date. The date matters because salaries and demand move, and in module 9 you will refresh this sheet once a year.
Below that, make four sections: salary, top skills, main employers and where you sit. Keep it to one page. If it spills over, you have copied in too much detail from your notes.
Start with the separate ranges you found in lesson 2.1, Where to find salary data you can trust. Write each one down with its source and the date you checked it. Then turn them into three figures for the role at the level you are aiming for.
Here is how Wei Ling did it with her example figures. She noted the bottom and top of the range in ten MyCareersFuture listings. Sorted, the bottoms of the ranges 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. With ten figures, the middle value is the average of the fifth and sixth, so the median bottom was S$4,100. Doing the same with the tops of the ranges gave a median top of S$5,350, and the median of the ten midpoints was S$4,725.
Her example figure from MOM's Occupational Wage Tables was a median gross wage of S$4,600 for the occupation. Her recruiter guide gave S$5,000 to S$6,500 for the junior band.
She then set her three figures. Low: S$4,100, the median bottom of the live listings, because that is what a typical employer would open with. Typical: S$4,700, because the wage table median and the listings' median midpoint sat close together around that figure. High: S$5,400, rounded from the median top of the listings. 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. That is the habit to copy. If anyone asks where a number came from, including you in six months, the answer is on the page.
Take the tally from lesson 2.2, Read job ads like a recruiter, and copy in the ten skills that appeared most often, with the count next to each. Wei Ling's top ten from her twenty example ads looked like this.
SQL, 18 of 20 ads 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 Project coordination, 6
The counts tell you more than the order. A skill in eighteen of twenty ads is close to a must-have. One in six of twenty is something you can mention if you have it and skip if you do not.
Copy in the ten employers from lesson 2.3, Who is hiring, and how to tell if it lasts, with a column for the level they hire at: entry, mid or senior. Add one more column for the route you might use to reach each, which you can leave blank for now. In module 5 you will fill it in with direct application, recruiter or referral.
Look at the pattern. If most of your employers hire at mid level and you are a switcher, the few that take entry-level or junior candidates go to the top of your list.
Finish with an honest sentence comparing yourself with the role today. Wei Ling wrote: "I have Excel, supply chain knowledge, 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."
That sentence 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 the CV work in module 3 much faster.
A finished market sheet has the role and date, a low, typical and high salary figure with a source for each, ten skills with counts, ten employers with levels, and your sentence. Do your first-choice direction carefully in the activity, then the second if you have time, because comparing two sheets side by side often settles which one to pursue.
Complete the market sheet for your first-choice direction and repeat it for your second if you have time.
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