What is the project managers salary range and how much can you make?

Okay, so now let's just talk about, you know, the thing, the sexy thing that everyone wants to know about first, and that is how much are you going to be paid as a remote project manager, right? So I, in a large sense, like you can divide up the different levels of project managers into 3 large buckets, and they are junior, intermediate, and senior. And what we have here on this graph, it will show you The average salary at each of these different levels, junior, intermediate, and senior. Now let's dive into each of these levels in more details now. So when you are a junior project manager, this is when you are basically like, this is your foot in the door. So for those of you who don't have experience, you'll probably start off as a junior PM. You could also be called a project coordinator or project manager assistant at this level. So you'll be basically doing the grunt work in terms of project management. This is where you're assisting the project manager and doing a lot of the technical kind of tasks. So for example, if the project manager wants to figure out who is going on vacation over the next week, you will probably be the one going through the whole team asking everyone, when are you going on vacation? And then putting all of that into an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet. for the project manager to view. Or maybe the project manager wants to figure out the forecast for the budget for the next quarter, and he or she doesn't have time to put together the report, so they will ask the junior PM to put that together. So you'd be putting together reports, you'd be putting together spreadsheets, and that sort of thing. But you'll have very little decision-making power at this level. The salary range you can expect is between $40,000 to $65,000 as a junior PM in today's markets. Once you get promoted beyond that, you'll become an intermediate PM. At the intermediate PM level, you will actually have the authority to apply the organization's resources in order to help the company accomplish the objectives that they're trying to in order to deliver the project deliverables. This is when you will actually be able to provide direction to the team, make sure that everyone is doing their job, manage the schedule and the budget, and you will also have to manage your stakeholders as well, right? So you'll be managing up and you'll be managing down. You have to manage your team, but also manage your stakeholders' expectations as well. So the main difference between the intermediate level and the senior level is the size of the project that you're managing. So at the intermediate level, you'll generally be given small to mid-sized projects. Usually the budget is less than $1 million at the intermediate level, so you can expect a salary range between $70,000 to $95,000 per year. And at the senior level, this is when you'll be known as the project lead or department head. So at this stage, you will be managing critical projects or projects, multiple projects, with budgets in the millions, and you'll usually have teams from all over the world, so you have to deal with different time zones and the like. So the senior PM is going to earn between $95,000 to $140,000 per year. And what you can see is that project management is really a career path that you can grow with. My mom is a nurse and there's no different levels to a nurse. She is basically just getting her salary increases at the rate of inflation. But project management is not a career like that because there is a steady growth. If you're willing to work hard and hustle to get to that next promotion, there's definitely a lot of opportunities in this field. Nowadays, companies of sizes are hiring for remote project managers or remote workers in general for 2 important reasons. The first reason is that they want to gain access to worldwide talent, and second reason is probably the elephant in the room, and that's COVID-19.

Right, right.

So yeah, right? I don't think that that shocks anybody. I think it's affected all of our lives in many different ways, and a lot of companies were forced to shut down or to either shut down or to have everyone work remotely, right? So it wasn't a lot of companies that was hesitant to move into the remote setting was suddenly given an ultimatum. Either you move remote or you had to shut down. So all companies are trying to figure out how do they transition to online at the moment, right? And these are companies from any industry, Like IBM, Bank of America, Cisco, AT&T, Deloitte. Really, all in there. There are remote opportunities in all industries right now. So, so don't let industry fit be something that prevents you from looking and exploring into the option of becoming a remote project manager. So project management is a profession that can give you many opportunities, career advancement options, high pay, and work flexibility. And it is also a career path that you can grow with, with time as well, right? So now I want to just tell you about something that you may not be as familiar with, and that's contracting. So I think everyone's familiar with working as an employee, you know, you get hired and you just get your paycheck every 2 weeks or Every 4 weeks or whatever the agreement is, right? But less people are familiar with being a contractor. Let me just explain how contractors work. Generally, when it's a larger company, they would use a recruiting agency. So kind of just focus on the, on the flow at the top right here. So the employer, generally it's like a big bank or someone like IBM or government agency, and they will say, you know, we need a project manager and For this role, we're willing to pay $825 per day. This is just an example. So the recruiter will go out into their database and find project managers who match the criteria that the employer is looking for. And then they would take about 10 to 25% of the total pay cut once the candidate has been selected. So they would go out, find candidates for the employer, the employer would interview them. And if there is one that the employer likes, then the recruitment agency will take care of all of the HR stuff. So it's, it's basically like the candidate is working for the recruitment agency legally on paper. But they're actually, you know, working for the government or the big bank or the big tech company, right? So the recruitment agency basically acts as a middle person. And the— and then after the recruitment agency takes their cut, you'll be left in this case, in this example, with $725 per day. And usually when it's a smaller company or a small mid-sized company, they usually don't have the budget to go for a recruitment agency. So they would go out and put the job posting out themselves. And they would just say like, you know, we're looking for a contractor project manager, we're willing to pay $5,000 per month, and boom, that entire sum goes to the project manager. So the reason— I should back up and just mention the reason that companies use contractors is if they don't have a project that's going to be ongoing. So if they know that the project is only going to be, you know, the next 6 months or something like that, and they know that this position won't exist after that, that's what motivates them to use a contractor PM. Versus an employee.

And I think this highlights the fact that people— that there are companies that use recruitment agencies highlights the need for really good matching. Right. And that was harder trying to get work from a pool of local project managers within an area. And so they're having to go to recruitment agencies to try to find talent that they can either bring in or find that they may not themselves be able to reach out to. So it's important to understand that it's literally a win-win situation when you are remote You can go look for a position somewhere outside of your local area, but they are also able to gain from it because they can now have— they have a higher number of possible members in a pool for talent, right? And so if you are someone who thrives on being really just providing quality work, quality management, then that's the kind of person that's going to now in the new economy for project management really thrive, right? It's no longer about the politics. It's not about who you know in order for advancement or any kind of stuff like that. It's now come down to the merit of work equality. And so you have to focus on providing good work, doing what you're supposed to. And companies like that, they're now being able to sort of bypass the recruitment agency, find talent because the pool of remote project managers is now increasing. That's not to say that it's saturated. It's just to say that now is a great opportunity for you guys to really think about that Because you don't have to work for someone locally. You can probably make more by working for someone in another area, in another area in the world or in the nation, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And when we— even though as a contractor you are taking on more risk because, you know, when your project ends, you have to find a new contract to take on. But the upside of that is that contractors usually get paid about double what the employee is getting paid when you work out the average salary. So when you're a contractor, You're usually paid per hour. At the intermediate level, you can expect about $60 per hour. And at the senior level, you can expect $100, $100+, $100+ per hour as a senior PM. Usually there's not a lot of contracting positions for the junior PM. If there is, you're probably looking at $20, $30 an hour kind of thing, but opportunities are less for the junior PM. So when, if you work out this, the average salary and compile that into a yearly salary, you can see that as a contractor, you'll be at the intermediate level, you're looking at $120,000 versus employees about $70,000. And at the senior level, you're looking at $187,000 versus $100,000 when you're an employee. So you're getting paid basically double if you are being— if you are a contractor, and if you have a steady flow of contracts coming in. Right. Okay. So for a lot of people, this is the biggest advantage of becoming a contractor, is that it gives them the freedom to take on new projects that they want, and they know they're not siloed into one specific field or project, and also they get to be paid more, right? So I should also say that if you ever dreamed of having your own business or increasing your income, then becoming a contractor PM could be a great option for you because you can use your existing skills to build this business because when you're a contractor PM, essentially you're having a B2B relationship with the company that you're working for because you have to open up your own business and the other company will pay you to your business instead of directly to your bank account, which is what they would do when you are an employee.

Right. And that's kind of interesting because if you've always been an employee and you've always had to go to the office, you've never seen an opportunity like this until now, right? It wasn't until the fact that now remote work is sort of pushed upon us. It's now okay to do remote work and remote management. And so all of a sudden you realize that you can do a lot of the work that is required within a certain allotted amount of time. And if you've ever been entrepreneurial, if you've ever had the entrepreneurial spirit, you kind of inside of you, you're kind of like, hmm, I wonder if I could just use more of my hours to do other work, right? For other clients or other companies. And it's not to say that, Always, all we're saying here is that it opens up an opportunity that you didn't have before to think about working remotely. That doesn't mean you have to be a contractor. It means you can totally be an employee if you want to do that, but there's options all of a sudden, right? All of a sudden it opens up an opportunity when you start thinking about project management remotely.

Absolutely. So just to sum up, here is the different working structures you can have as a remote PM. Uh, you could be an employee, or a contractor, you could be remote or on-site. And there's a lot of options, all sorts of options in between. And you could be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum here, where you could be 100% remote, where it's more— this is more of a degree rather than an absolute, I should say, because you could be 100% remote, 100% on-site, or anywhere in the middle.