Why are some employers looking for the junior specialist, while others need seniors? Why may a senior specialist have a salary ten times greater than a junior? And why this separation exists at all? Let us check what is the difference between different levels of specialists, and try to answer these questions.

Methodology

Before starting comparing the professional levels, let us agree on how we are going to evaluate them.

The first and most obvious criteria is professional skills. It defines the complexity of the tasks a person can handle and the quality of the results. The higher the level, the fewer mistakes a person makes, and by making fewer mistakes, a person needs fewer iterations and less time to solve the tasks.

The next criteria is learning time and cost. The more experience the person has, the less time he/she needs to learn something new, and so a person can apply this knowledge in practice earlier comparing to a less experienced person.

The final criteria in this list is the team value. Depending on the experience and skills, a competent professional can not only speed up the processes in the team but also maintain a proper atmosphere and prevent burnout. The bigger the team, the more important to have a high team value, and so a team can achieve the required result.

Levels Overview

We are going to use the most general level structure — junior, middle, and senior specialists.

A junior specialist is a person who is working in a professional area for a short period. It may be a student, a half-time employee, or a person who came from another area. One way or another, this person is a beginner, i.e., he/she has quite low professional skills, and so needs lots of time to produce a valuable result. The quality of the result is average or below average, and this is normal as everybody is expecting that. Learning time and costs are usually quite high. Sometimes an employer may even get a negative balance as the time needed to teach a junior plus the salary may cost more than the produced results. Team value may vary from low to medium, depending on leadership and soft skills. No organizational load here.

The middle specialist works in the area for a significant amount of time, usually at least for 3-5 years. This person has decent professional skills and the ability to handle medium and high-level tasks. The quality of the result is always above average, so there is no need to recheck them. Learning time and costs are usually average, but already 2-3 times lower than for the junior. Team value is usually average — middle specialist already may help juniors with the simple tasks and be able to review the results. This person may also have organizational load — e.g., be a mentor for a junior, or have a component lead role.

The senior specialist works in the area for an extended period — at least 5 years (approximately 10 000 hours), usually 10+ years. He/she is a real professional who can handle a task of any complexity with exceptional quality. Learning time and costs are the lowest, and it usually happens during the actual workflow. Team value is very high — a senior specialist supports both middle and junior specialists, answers their questions, and review the results of the complex tasks. The organizational load is very high too. It is a common situation when a senior specialist spends half of his/her time to organize the work of other team members to save even more time.

The Answers

Let us back to the questions we raised at the beginning of the article, and start from the need for the specialists. Different companies are looking for different levels of specialists, depending on their processes and needs. For example, a small company that has only a couple of employees may need two junior-level specialists to do simple tasks, and one middle specialist to review the results produced by juniors. On the contrary, a corporation may need lots of middle and senior-level specialists to work on multiple projects in multiple teams.

The next question is the salary. It depends on the roles performed by a specialist, and the total outcome of his work. The employer evaluates the cost of the employer (salary + learning cost + additional expenses) and compares it with the cost of the produced results. So, the more beneficial the employer for a company, the bigger the salary he/she may have. A junior usually has this balance close to zero or even negative — so a company loses money in exchange for future profits from teamwork. And a senior may earn several times more than his/her salary by performing multiple roles and handling the organization activities.

Finally, the question is why this separation exists? There are several answers here. First, an employer groups his tasks based on the complexity, and it needs people with the appropriate qualification levels to solve these tasks. Second, an employer needs somebody to organize the work of other employees, and the best candidate for this role is somebody from the same area who has leadership skills and can handle the organizational load. Third, depending on the situation inside the company, an employer may need to balance a number of specialists of different levels, and this separation is a quite useful abstraction that allows doing that. And finally, this separation simplifies the people management in general by providing three separate groups with different responsibilities and needs.