At this time of year we are immersed in college football. You may have heard that the highest paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state university. But sometimes that information is absolutely wrong – sometimes it’s the basketball coach. Nick Sabin leads the way at Alabama with
a pay plan of $5,545,852. Mack Brown at Texas is close behind at $5,453,750. Yes, these are employees of the states they represent. The most popular career choice for little boys is they want to grow up to be pro athletes. Check out the infographic here to see how commonly the head football coach is the highest paid state employee.
On a related note, McDonald’s now estimates that one in every eight Americans has been employed by their company. Sharon Stone worked at McDonald’s before she was famous. So did Shania Twain, Jay Leno, Rachel McAdams, Seal, Andie Macdowell, Star Jones and Pink. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also got his start there and recently told Fast Company that ”one of the great gifts I got from that job is that I can crack eggs with one hand. My favorite shift was Saturday morning. The first thing I would do is get a big bowl and crack 300 eggs into it.”
Walmart has 2.2 million employees – more than 1.4 million in the United States alone. In a recent year, CEO Michael Duke’s annual salary of $35 million earned him more in an hour than a full-time employee makes in an entire year.
We know open work spaces have exploded in popularity. So we can all support each other and brainstorm and be more creative – right? Well, it turns out 85% of the people in those open workplaces are dissatisfied and can’t concentrate. 31% said they have to leave the office to get work completed. Of those surveyed, only 6.1% surveyed thought it was healthy to be in an open-plan environment and just 6.5% thought it was productive.
And yes, 81% of Americans continue to say they would change jobs is they could or knew how.
The workplace continues to change daily. Don’t be surprised by that – expect it and look for new opportunities all around you.
Take action to move into the work you love.
I’m working on “taking action”! I need to work harder at it. Thanks for the continual support toward my goal.
It’s Nick Saban. 🙂 and his pay is now almost 7 million per year. Note that the college or state does not pay that, the state only pays about 250k and the rest is paid by corporate sponsorship/advertising deals.
Dan, you may be onto something here with important implications for education. Can you attribute the survey about the work spaces? I’m in public education and there is a significant movement afoot for “21st century” collaborative learning. Supposedly, the “experts”, many of which haven’t spent five days in the real world, believe that the future of work are these open, collaborative work environments. It’s my personal belief that the “experts” are fool of themselves and don’t really understand people as much as they think they do. I just want the link to the survey, so I can look at it and possibly use it to communicate to others with.