Online Exclusive: Beauty by the Numbers—2011 Beauty Packaging Salary and Career Survey
How do you stack up to your peers? Following are the stats that will enable you to get a good picture of a cross-section of the cosmetics/beauty/fragrance packaging industry. One piece of good news that emerged: More than 62% of respondents indicated that they were feeling “very secure” or “secure” in their current job.

Welcome to the inaugural Beauty Packaging Salary and Career Survey. This fall, we polled beauty industry players from large and small beauty manufacturers who worked in various jobs connected to packaging development and design, marketing, corporate, and manufacturing, to get a reading on their attitudes toward their jobs, level of education, and salaries, as well as what their biggest concerns are at work and in the industry at large.

Our online survey tallied approximately 250 respondents—so, a special thanks goes out to all who participated. We’re looking forward to including even more of you in our 2012 survey.

Beauty Packaging Salary and Career Survey respondents came from large (36.6%) and small (63.4%) manufacturers of personal care/beauty products.

They included Packaging Procurement (2.1%), Packaging Development (10.7%), Product Development/Management (15.6%), Packaging Design/Engineering (9.5%), QC/Marketing/Sales (17.3%), R&D (18.9%), Corporate Management (10.7%), Purchasing/Production/Manufacturing (8.2%) and other (7.0%), which included varied titles such as Branding and Packaging, Print Production Creative, Brand Management, and technical scouting.

By gender, 61.2% of respondents were women and 38.8% were men. Age ranged from 26 to 69. Regarding education, 23.3% of the respondents have Master’s degrees, 56% obtained Bachelor’s degrees; 6% have Doctorate level education, 14.7% checked “other.” Responses included high school diploma and some college.

The majority of respondents came from the US (73.8%); 6% came from Europe, and 9.5% came from Asia. Other (10.8%) included Mexico, Canada; Latin and Central America, and Africa, among others.

Job Retention

For those who serve in a management position, 55.6% said they oversee one to four people, 21.9% said they oversee five to 10 people, 10.6% said they are responsible for 11-20 staff, 8.6% said they are responsible for 21-50 people, 1.3% said they oversee 51-100 staffers, just 2% said they oversee more than 100 people.

According to our data, 83.3% of the survey respondents this year said they did not lay off staff in the past 12 months, while about 16.7% said they did.

Here is a look at the salary levels for survey respondents based on job title. All responses are in U.S. dollars. Overall, our survey respondents reported their income as follows:
 

For the salary by age breakdown, the majority (80%) of those under age 25 were in the $50,000 to $74,999 range. For those 25 to 34, 35.7% were in the under $49,000 range, while 30.4% were in the $50,000 to $74,999 bracket. For the 35 to 44 bracket, 38.5% were in the more than $100,000 categories with 17.3% in the $50,000 to $74,999 and another 17% in the $75,000 to $99,000 range. For those 45 to 54, 40% earned more than $100,000 and other respondents were split evenly over the other categories. More than 45.5% of the respondents 55 or more were in the over $100,000 category. (Results may be slightly skewed due to a small number of respondents in some categories.)

For salary by gender, 44% of the males earned more than $100,000 while just 23.2% of the women did. The trend continued with 17.8% of men earning $75,000 to $100,000, while just 10.6% of the women did.

About 96.5% of respondents indicated that they have not been laid off in the last year and 87% have not switched jobs. About 63% reported that their department’s budget has not been reduced in the last year and 60.4% said they received a raise. Ninety percent say they have not taken a cut in their base salary in the past year, while 84.3% reported that their company has not stopped matching 401 (k) contributions or cut any retirement related benefits.

Respondents reported a few aspects of their beauty packaging jobs frustrate them right now. Internal politics (27.7%) tops the list, followed by inadequate project funding/resources (25.7%), inadequate compensation (21.5%), lack of advancement (15.2%), merger/acquisition/layoff fears (6.8%), and Wall Street/shareholder expectations (3.1%).

Despite these detractions, 50% report that they are very unlikely, or unlikely to leave their current position, with just 15.3% saying they are very likely to leave for another job in the next two years. In fact, 62.7% indicated that they were feeling very secure or secure in their current job. More than 50% noted that they do not feel like their company will be acquired in the next 12 months.
And with positive reports brewing every day, all have every reason to believe that 2012 will be an even better year for the beauty packaging industry.