Kaliko,

Facilitator, performance consultant,coach etc.
are the products of niche marketing in the Knowledge Age.

Nero

Hello, I'm the author of the 2007 ASTD State of the Industry Report, and I feel the need to address the main point raised in this thread. I think there might be some misunderstanding of the data on p. 15 of the report. I'm having some diffculty comprehending how learning professionals with little experience are "in the same pay band" as learning professionals with much more experience.

Specifically, for learning professionals in the 1-2 years experience category, 44.5% earn less than $50,000 per year. In comparison, only 8.5% of learning professionals with 10-20 years experience earn less than $50,000.

At the opposite end of the pay scale, only 13.1% of learning professionals with 1-2 years experience earn $90,000 or above. Among learning professionals with 10-20 years experience, the percentage earning $90,000 or above is much higher at 35.2%.

I hope this clarifies ASTD's interpretation of these trends. The data is indicating that income tends to increase as experience in the field accumulates.

Dear Andrew - thank you for clarifying the data. I was primarily focused on mean and median, not the upper and lower ends of the scale. It seems odd to me that there was a similar percentage of people in both ends of the experience spectrum averaging the same income. If I misread that part, it was unintentional, but it does seem to read that despite experience, there is a similar average salary.

As one who has recently went through the interview process, I can agree that most people who are hiring for training-related positions really are clueless when it comes to the performance aspect. When you speak with them about training and why it doesn't work, most of them give you a blank stare (or dead silence on the phone).

IMO, training (for the most part) has been so poorly designed, developed and implemented that the people doing the hiring don't know the difference. How many people in training positions continue to put together a PowerPoint presentation and call it a learning experience? How many times do IT Trainers click through things so fast that you couldn't capture it with Captivate and call it good?

I call it the checkmark mentality, where supervisory-types are more interested in seeing a checkmark next to their employees name saying they were "trained". Afterall, I can scream at them after they mess up if they were trained.

RIGHT??