Skyrocketing Salaries – Good times ahead !

Yesterday I was speaking to someone and found that he had missed this issue of Business Today which I feel all of us definitely need to go through as it has a number of great nuggets wrt our profession as well as the Industry at large. One thing is for sure, we cannot complain of inflation as it gets adequately taken care of when we get paid our fee on a percentage basis (specially on enhanced remuneration numbers !)

Other than talking in detail about some of the High Growth Sectors such as Aviation, Financial Services, Engineering/Manufacturing, IT-Enabled Services, IT Services, Pharmaceuticals, Real Estate, Retail, Telecom it also goes on to list the skill sets which are in demand and says that the professionals, with those skill sets, are commanding a premium as there are not enough of them there to meet the demand.

Indeed, execs at headhunting companies (some insist they be called HR consultants focussed on recruitment; others are happy with the more prosaic search firms) rattle off a list of executives who have recently moved jobs and the impressive salaries at which they have moved. R.S. Prasad moved from Dr Reddy's to head Chennai-based Orchid Chemicals and Pharmaceutical's formulations business at a salary of Rs 1.5 crore a year; Lloyd Mathias left Pepsi where (page 53) he was Executive Vice President (Marketing), to head the marketing function at Motorola India at a salary significantly higher than the Rs 50-60 lakh-a-year he was earning at the beverages major; Sanjay Viswanathan moved from igate (he was head of Europe) to GECIS as Managing Director, Europe, at a salary of $300,000 (Rs 1.32 crore); and Padma Ravichander signed on as head of Perot Systems India (from Oracle) at a salary of $325,000 (Rs 1.43 crore). "Indian salaries, especially for senior managers, is fast racing towards the $250,000 (Rs 1.1 crore) mark," says Venkatesh Shastry, Associate Director, Stanton Chase, a headhunting firm. "This is comparable to the compensation in the us for middle-to-senior-level positions." The Indian salaryman has arrived.

It's celebration time for salaried professionals with salaries nudging the magical Rs 1-crore-a-year mark. The good news - things can only get better.