The IIAR> Institute of Influencer & Analyst Relations / Why is Analyst Relations commanding a 46% salary premium over Public Relations?

Drawing on the 2017 IIAR> Salary Survey produced by CB Resourcing, we thought it would be interesting to expand the information gathered with a comparison against the wider sector of public relations.

The size of the gap between AR and PR is staggering

When we compare Analyst Relations to more general Public Relations roles for Director level/Rank 1 Analyst Relations get paid significantly more, an average of 46% above Public Relations roles in the UK. In the majority of cases Senior Manager/Rank 2 Analyst Relations are also paid more however, the salary gap between them and Public Relations roles is not as large and in the Technology sector average basic salaries are the same.

What’s so special about AR?

Analyst relations is quite a specialised area focussing on the management and influence of industry analysts which can feed into the wider PR and corporate communications strategy. and found some interesting facts about the variance of salaries within the sector.

There are close connections between analyst relations and public relations within organisations. In fact in our research we found quite often because of the specialist, niche area of analyst relations, a person covered analyst relations as part of their role and public relations orientated functions for the rest of their role. Although public relations as a term is not used as often now we have looked at roles within marketing and communications that are associated with managing public relations and corporate affairs for organisations. We have used data from Croner UK as a comparison to our own research looking specifically at Technology, Professional Services and Telecoms sectors.

When reviewing the data we took an average of basic salaries to protect confidentiality from the research that we conducted in Analyst Relations and did the same with the Croner data to compare like with like. In a couple of instances UK data for Analyst Relations was lacking. This is down to the specialist and global nature of the role which results in a lot of roles being based in Head Offices located in the US. In these cases we have taken an average of basic salaries and converted to GBP. You can see details in the chart below (all figures are ‘000 GBP).

Firstly looking at the sectors themselves, Telecoms comes out as the highest paid sector with average salaries in Analyst Relations for Director level (Rank 1 in Croner) coming out at above the other sectors – 25% above the Technology sector and 19% above the Professional Service sector. For Senior Manager level (Rank 2 in Croner) Telecoms came out as 45% above the Technology sector and 38% above the Professional Services sector.

Professional Services in the next highest paid sector for Analyst Relations in UK with Technology companies coming in third. Differences in pay for Technology and Professional Service companies though is not very big varying between 7 and 11%.

In general then, the more specialist/niche the role the higher the salary is which we would expect. It would be interesting to hear your views and comments on this particularly on experiences on salaries for highly specialised roles in other sectors.