What is the highest and lowest salary range of a taxidermist?

Salary range for business intelligence/reporting analysts in NC

• What is a reasonable salary range for a business intelligence/reporting analyst? Every site I have reviewed seems to indicate that the pay range is much higher than the reactions I receive when quoting my salary requirements seems to indicate. Business intelligence/reporting analysts design reporting and analytics, usually from a data warehouse through a business intelligence tool like MicroStrategy, to assist in management decision and oversight of business functions. I include that brief description so that people who do not know that exact title may know the job under a different name. I am looking at jobs in the cities in central and western NC. I have more than five years of experience in reporting design, deployment and analysis, a relevant business graduate degree, and have always received lavish praise from bosses and peers for my work. I am not a programmer, although I can build SQL queries well enough and understand relational db structure. My current job uses a MicroStrategy reporting tool, and I am the sole reporting analyst tasked with using MicroStrategy to design queries and extract data for analysis and reporting, which I design and implement along with reporting based on data generated outside of that environment. I am female. I have researched all the online tools that offer salary ranges for jobs similar to mine. They all begin at about 45k and go up from there, but the median I've seen is generally about 60k in this area. Based on my skill set and experience, I have been quoting the mid fifties to mid sixties in interviews, but invariably the recruiter lets a long pause build, then doubtfully asks if I'm able to be flexible. I know that you're supposed to play the game with them and not give them a range, but I've not had any luck with it. Is this simply a game they play because they want to knock down my price, or are my requirements actually unreasonable? What is reasonable?

• Answer:

  To me that range does seem really low. I do SQL based analytics, and I have less experience with specific business intelligence tools. I work for a very well known dot com in Portland, OR and my salary is more like the lower 80s. I don't know how much differences there may be with cost of living between the two regions. However, it does sound like you have been very successful in your current job, but you might not have the sort of in-depth technical database knowledge that recruiters are looking for. If I were you, I would get more proactive about expanding your database skills and also selling those as well as you can. I assume you're not describing your SQL skills as "good enough" in an actual interview, right?