By Gretchen Kiser
Last month, Oct.17-21, NORDP members presented a poster at the SRA International conference in Las Vegas. Terri Solberg, Lorraine Mulfinger, Ann McGuigan, and I authored the poster, covering the highlights from our recent analysis of the NORDP 2015 annual salary survey (members-only detailed information can be found here). The poster also presented some basics of research development (RD) and the RD professional, as well as NORDP as an organization. Lorraine and I were both in attendance, and we can tell you that the poster received much interest. Many of the SRA attendees that visited the poster were RD professionals and just didn’t know it; they appreciated knowing there was an organization of like peers and were interested in learning more. Everyone who visited the poster was very interested in the salary information and found the potential of a salary calculator tool very helpful. We had 80 take-away poster handouts and every one of them was distributed!
Notably, there was also a poster and associated presentation from Jennifer Sambrook et al. that described a meta-analysis of research administrator (RA) survey data across time (including data from a 1968 SRA survey). They described several interesting trends within the ranks of research administrators: RAs have gone from being primarily male in 1968 to predominantly female in 2015, the average age of an RA is increasing, the number of RAs with a Master’s degree in on the upward trend, and salaries in the last five years have not changed much and sit around 40% with a median salary between $50K and $75K (with another 25% between $75K and $100K). Interestingly, the NORDP salary survey showed that the majority of RD professionals’ salaries are similarly distributed, even though the highest degree earned is significantly higher – 37% of RAs are Bachelor degree holders vs. 9% of RD professionals; 46% of RAs are Masters degree holders vs. ~52% of RD professionals; and 9% of RAs are Doctoral degree holders vs. 37% of RD professionals. Hmm…
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