The 2024 DAM Salary Survey Results are Now Available!
This post has been kindly contributed by Elizabeth Keathley. The 2024 DAM Salary Survey was conducted and authored by Elizabeth Keathley, Lisa Grimm, Deb Fanslow, and Jennifer Tyner.
In the attached report from the fourth collection of data using the survey questions first formulated in 2012, the authors are happy to report that salaries and working conditions for Digital Asset Managers have much improved over the last thirteen years. The median of yearly full-time wages was $99,000; the yearly mode (most reported) of yearly full-time wages was $100,000; the mean (average) of all full time yearly wages was $109,645.
The only correlation in any area to pay was experience. The longer a person works in Digital Asset Management, the more they are paid. Education, demographics, even location and type of employer now all take a backseat to experience when it comes to compensation for this type of work. Workers with more than a decade of experience in the field were most likely to be in the top third of reported salaries. It is notable, however, that this salary survey was missing the high outliers that appeared in earlier versions – no one reported making over $350,000 per year.
The authors undertook this round of the salary survey in response to anecdotal evidence that wages in the profession may have gone down or stagnated. Very undesirable job postings for work with Digital Asset Management systems with low wages often circulate online and get forwarded among peers with disbelief. This may be due to Human Resource professionals using outdated salary information from previous surveys, as the last iteration of this survey was carried out in 2017.
According to the data from this new survey, those low-wage job postings for Digital Asset Managers circulating online are anomalous. Positions in Digital Asset Management that pay well are posted less frequently and fill quickly. Positions that pay less than the average wage are more likely to hang out on job boards for longer periods of time, or re-post again and again as those who take them tend to get experience and then move on. Survey results show high mobility in the field, with most Digital Asset Managers staying at any one employer around four years before moving on.
Only six percent of Digital Asset Managers are required to work in-office/on site all the time. The prevalence of remote work options is one of the biggest changes in the profession, and nearly half of all Digital Asset Management positions are 100% remote. In keeping with this change, pay is no longer tied to location. In the first two surveys in particular, high salaries were tied to Las Angeles, London, and New York employers. This is no longer the case, as location has been fully decoupled from compensation.
Download the new report at the links below or take a look at the anonymized data for any of the previous surveys hosted here at DAM News. A deeper look at this information, along with discussion of roles and sample job descriptions, will be available later this year in the book Practical Digital Asset Management: A Guide for Students and Practioners by survey authors Lisa Grimm and E. Keathley from Bloomsbury Libraries Unlimited.
Download all files as a zip (1.06 MB)
Download the report in PDF Format (635 kB)
Download the report in Microsoft Word Format (479 kB)
Download the anonymized data (XLSX, 51 kB)
DAM News subscribers can download previous survey results via their account dashboard (free registration required).
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