This year's FM World Salary Survey involves a wider variety of facilities managers and a more even spread of FM employment types. And more importantly, as we report later in the magazine, there are signs of an increasingly dynamic employment market.
20 May 2015
It has become customary at the beginning of our annual salary survey report to comment on the balance of responses from those FMs working in-house versus those from outsourced service providers.
That figure has been stubbornly fixed at around 65/35 in favour of the former for years. For 2015, however, we can point to a slight rebalancing - it's now a 60/40 split.
What's more, the number of industry sectors represented in this year's survey continue to dazzle in terms of sheer diversity, showing a further increase in the number of sectors, with FMs from the oil, chemicals and engineering sectors right through to transport, leisure, healthcare and retail. This really is a broad spread, helping to further debunk any stereotype about facilities management as a purely office-based discipline.
Of course, plenty of office-based sectors are represented. FMs from finance, banking and legal firms continue to make up the largest cohort of respondents (albeit at 12 per cent, a smaller percentage than last year), and we've seen 10 per cent from engineering, construction and manufacturing, 6 per cent retail, 5 per cent health care and more than 10 per cent from the charity and non-profit sectors.
There's also been a broadening out of the size of company represented in the poll, with 52 per cent employed at firms employing more than 1,000 people. That figure was up at 58 per cent last year, and we've seen a corresponding increase in the number of FMs at companies employing between 201 and 1,000 people.
As for gender balance, the response mirrors the anecdotal evidence from recruitment agencies suggesting that, gradually, women are comprising an ever-growing percentage of the FM workforce. Last year the split was 70/30 in favour of men, this year 66/34. A small change, perhaps, but a welcome one.
And if that's encouraging, so is the age range. In our 2010 poll, just 18 per cent of survey respondents were aged under 35. This year it's 33 per cent - fully a third of those taking part.
Over the following pages you'll find the rest of this year's results as well as commentary on the state of the market for facilities managers from some of the sector's recruitment specialists. Thanks as ever to the hundreds of you who who took the trouble to fill in the survey - we appreciate it hugely.
