Behind every salary, benefit, and incentive is a person or team of people who work to help a company recognise and reward their employees. Total rewards brings these elements together, balancing employee needs with organisational objectives and budgets.
For those who enjoy working with numbers, solving problems and understanding what motivates people, it offers an interesting career path. Whether you are starting your first job or moving from HR, payroll or finance, there are several routes into compensation, benefits and reward analyst roles.
Understand What Total Rewards Involves
Total rewards covers all the financial and non-financial aspects of the total experience of work for employees. Examples include basic salary, bonuses, retirement benefits, employee benefits, recognition, health and wellbeing at work and development opportunities at work.
In compensation-related work, salary structures and total remuneration are analysed and established. In benefits-related work, schemes like pensions, life insurance, employee assistance programmes and more are set up and managed. Reward analysts in particular deal with data and use this in order to support decision-making in both fields.
In smaller businesses, one role may cover several responsibilities. Larger organisations often have separate teams, allowing professionals to specialise as their careers develop.
Explore the Main Entry Routes
There is no fixed path for a career in total rewards. Many start their careers as graduate trainees within HR or start in an administrative role within HR and then move into compensation and benefits.
Many HR administrators and co-ordinators complete their development in reward within an employee’s annual salary review, or dealing with benefits queries from employees. They can also support managers with dealing with reward related issues within their area.
Payroll, finance and benefits administration are three areas that can lead to a role within total rewards. Candidates with experience in these areas will bring knowledge of pay processes, be able to work accurately and confidentially and provide specialist knowledge of employee benefits.
If you are already working in an HR administrator role, perhaps assisting with a salary review for example, then try to get involved in a reward project within your current organisation in order to gain some relevant experience and demonstrate your interest in compensation & benefits roles.
Build Your Analytical Skills
Data analysis is a key skill for the compensation and reward analyst roles and working confidently with data and information, and helping others to understand it is key to HR roles.
Experience of working with formulas, such as averages and growth rates, as well as data management using lookup functions and pivot tables can also be useful to understand when analysing salary data or calculating increases or summaries.
Accuracy is as important as the work itself, and building out clear checking processes for your work is crucial to avoiding errors in your spreadsheets and analysis that can lead to inaccurate recommendations.
This also means that you should learn to present your results in a simple way. Someone without an analytical background should easily be able to understand a pay comparison that you prepared.
Develop Your Understanding of Reward
In addition to developing your analytical skills, it would be helpful for you to gain a working knowledge of the main concepts that are used by a reward team, i.e. salary benchmarking, pay bands, job evaluation, annual pay reviews and bonus schemes.
Before choosing any type of work, it’s worth looking at job specifications of roles you are interested in and seeing whether they require formal study, experience, or specific skills such as IT software.
Look for Suitable Entry-Level Positions
Your first role may not include “total rewards” in its title. Look for roles such as reward administrator, benefits administrator, compensation assistant, junior reward analyst and HR assistant with elements of reward within the job specification.
Many ‘entry level’ roles that are of interest will be described within the remit of broader HR departments. Ensure that consideration is given to the ‘duties and responsibilities’ of each role, in order to assess the extent to which salary data, benefits administration, reporting and/or pay review support are features of the respective role.
Consider support on offer at a company and potential for training and development in a new role. Also consider exposure to different aspects of a reward department and potential for working with senior and experienced colleagues in the HR function.
Make Your Application Relevant
Draw a line from your past experiences to how you can apply them to the role which you are applying for, highlighting your data analysis skills, your accuracy when maintaining data and paper work, your confidentiality and your ability to work under pressure to meet tight deadlines.
If possible show the end results of your work whether this was improving a reporting spreadsheet or sorting out a payroll error affecting employees’ benefits.
Also ensure that you are able to demonstrate your numerical ability as well as your ability to communicate in order to explain why you are interested in reward and how you will add value to the organisation.
Take the Next Step in Your Reward Career
The role of a junior position in starting a career in total rewards is to provide the relevant experience of managing the pay and benefits of an organisation combined with an understanding of the different ways in which this can be done. From there, a total rewards specialist can go on to specialise in a particular area, progress to a management role or even work internationally.
We can help place candidates in compensation, benefits and total rewards roles. Whether you are a complete beginner to the field or already have relevant experience and are looking to move on to the next stage in your reward career, contact Alchemy Global Talent Solutions to discuss your requirements and look at the current vacancies we have available.
