It’s the one thing everyone thinks about, but no one wants to talk about – and that’s how much money you make as an elearning developer. Just like any industry, you’re going to generally find a bell curve for salary distribution. There are some easy strategies to ensure that you are on the top end of the curve, but that’s not what this post is about (for information on those strategies, take a look at this post).

Earlier this year, Learning Solutions Magazine released an article that compared the different salaries of elearning designers across different continents. Below is their visual representation of the distribution.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking: “I should move to Australia” (side note: you should, it’s a beautiful country). All kidding aside though, it appears that the industry average is just around $77,500 – which isn’t bad; certainly better than others. But honestly, it could (and should) be higher.

If you’re looking to get an immediate jump, it looks like the quickest way is to just jump to an organization with more employees. According to the survey, employees at companies with 50,000+ employees also reported the highest salaries. Also, tailor your skills towards the pharmaceutical/biotech industries. This makes sense, these are high-demand areas that are constantly changing – specializing in these niches will undoubtedly increase your bottom line.

Overall, the way to increase the overall salary range is to better educate key decision makers on the benefits of the elearning design skill-set. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the only ones to gain any real traction will be educational efforts around how quality instructional design and elearning development practices increases the bottom line.

If you’re curious to see where you fall within this spectrum (with a more detailed report), then you can use the elearning calculator (located at the bottom of the page here).