You will be able to build a defensible salary range for your role from Singapore sources.
Hafiz is a data analyst at a bank in Marina Bay, four years into his career. A healthcare group has invited him to a final interview for a senior analyst role, and the HR manager has already asked what salary he's looking for. He told her he'd get back to her. Now he's at home with a forum thread open. One poster with a similar title claims to earn twice his pay, and the next says the market is terrible.
Neither post helps him. What he needs is a range he can build himself, from sources he could name if asked. This lesson shows how to build that range from sources any job seeker in Singapore can reach. Any figures in it are examples, never a guide to real pay.
The Ministry of Manpower publishes the Occupational Wage Tables, based on its own surveys of employers. They're free on MOM's website, and they report wages by occupation and by industry, so you can look up something close to your role and see how pay is spread across the people doing it.
Two things to keep in mind. First, use the latest edition, and note its date, because each one describes a past survey period and the market may have moved since. Second, find the occupation that matches your actual work, which isn't always the same as your job title. "Analyst" covers many different jobs. Read the descriptions and pick the closest fit, then check whether the tables give figures for your industry, since a bank and a hospital group may pay the same occupation quite differently.
The tables are the most neutral source you'll find. Nobody produced them to win a negotiation, which makes them a good objective criterion in the sense of lesson 1.3, Separate the people from the problem.
Large recruitment firms publish salary guides for Singapore, often once a year. Hays, Michael Page and Robert Walters are three that do. They usually give salary ranges by role and seniority within a specialism, such as finance, technology or marketing.
These guides are useful because they're closer to how employers think about hiring. They group roles the way job ads do, and they often reflect recent placements. Keep in mind that recruiters have their own view of the market, and their ranges reflect the roles and companies they place candidates with. That's not a reason to ignore them, but it is a reason to use more than one.
Hafiz downloads two guides and notes the range each gives for a senior data analyst in his sector, with the year of each guide.
The third source is live: current job listings. MyCareersFuture, the national jobs portal, shows salary ranges on its listings, so you can see what employers are actually offering for roles like yours this month.
Search for your target role and read ten or more listings. Ignore the ones that clearly don't match: different seniority, very different duties or a specialist skill you don't have. Note the range on each of the rest. You'll usually see a cluster where most fall, and a few outliers above and below.
Listings tell you something the other sources can't: what's happening right now. Wage tables describe the past, and guides are updated once a year at most. If several companies are advertising similar roles with higher ranges than last year's guide suggests, that's worth knowing. If the healthcare group itself has a listing for the role, its range is a strong clue to its budget, as lesson 2.3, Estimate theirs and find the zone of possible agreement, pointed out.
Now put it together. Hafiz has three kinds of evidence: the wage table for his occupation and industry, two recruiter guide ranges, and a cluster of listing ranges. In his example notes, they overlap roughly between S$6,500 and S$8,000 a month. That's his market range for the role.
A range is more useful than a single number, and more honest. Where you sit within it depends on things you can name. Hafiz has four years' experience, which puts him in the middle of what the listings ask for. He has built dashboards used by senior management, and he knows a programming language that several listings mark as preferred. Those push him up. He has never worked in healthcare, which might pull him slightly down.
He writes his conclusion in one line: "Market range S$6,500 to S$8,000, from the wage tables, two salary guides and twelve current listings. I sit in the upper half because of my dashboard work and programming skills." Every part of that sentence can be checked.
Keep your notes with sources and dates, the same habit from lesson 3.1, Research the market and the other side. You'll use them in lessons 7.3 and 7.4, and the person on the other side may ask where your numbers came from.
The activity asks you to gather your own three kinds of data, write down where each came from, and set out your range.
Collect at least three data points for your role from MOM data, a recruiter salary guide and current job listings, with sources, and write your range.
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