Employers in the United States have shown trends of movement from performance- or tenure-based compensation systems to skill-based compensation models in recent years. Middlebury is no exception.
The college department of Human Resources unveiled a new skill-based compensation system, known as the “skill matrix” system, in July 2022.
About a year and half since the program’s implementation, staff have largely positive feelings toward the system’s prioritization of higher pay for the college’s lowest paid employees, and Human Resources’ efforts to be transparent about the system. Employees still have concerns, however, about uneven interpretation of the system across departments of the college, the hard cap for employees at the high end of their salary range and how job descriptions are used to benchmark positions to the market.
“Compensation is huge. It is so important to employees, so central to work,” said Colleen Norden, a systems and communications specialist at the Center for Teaching, Learning and Research (CTLR) and president of Staff Council “You can say ‘yay,’ it’s great to work at a higher education institution with a wonderful mission, all the great students we get to work with, but the reality is wages are essential.”
The current compensation system established a pay grade range for each position, based on comparison to wages at a group of schools determined to be peer institutions, which include Roger Williams University and Suffolk University. In the past, staff members have raised concerns about the grouping of peer institutions, given that Roger Williams’ endowment is $88 million and Suffolk’s endowment is $255 million compared to Middlebury’s $1.47 billion endowment.
Within the pay grade range, employees are placed into the skill matrix categories of either “learning,” “growing,” “thriving” or “leading,” which correspond to 0%, 25%, 50% and 60% of the market range, respectively. Human Resources aimed to fully fund the ‘leading’ category to 75% of the market range, but it did not reach that goal for this fiscal year.
“It is still a priority to get it to 75% and it’s also a priority to continue to invest in compensation for all employees,” Caitlin Goss, vice president of human resources and chief people officer, told The Campus.
The system also raised the minimum wage at the college to $17.60 an hour, according to Goss. While Middlebury’s minimum wage has increased substantially since early 2020, a livable wage in Addison County for a single adult with no children is $23.33 per hour, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator.
Staff members’ placement within the skill matrix categories is reviewed by their supervisors yearly. Employees who do not receive a skill matrix bump are eligible for extra discretionary money — between $500 and $3,000 in increments of $500 — or one-time payments for those who are already at the cap of their market range.
Terry Simpkins, director of discovery and access services in the library, and the chair of the Staff Council Compensation and Benefits Subcommittee, described parts of the system that are still unclear to staff.
“It still feels like there is a fair amount to the process that is a little opaque to staff,” Simpkins said.
The Compensation and Benefits Subcommittee sent a series of questions and recommendations to Human Resources in March. This submission to Human Resources inquired about how the targets for the number of staff who can move up on the skill matrix in any given year are determined, how the annual market raises are determined, how positions are placed in pay grades and how budget dollars for unfilled positions are used.
The college does a reassessment in January or February to determine if the overall market rate shifted over the past year, according to Goss. Last year, the aggregate assessment of inflation, cost of living and other indicators at peer institutions resulted in a 3.5% increase in staff salary ranges across the board.
“Our goal is through this program to capture all of those shifts in that market,” Goss said.
Norden described the uncertainty as to whether the market reassessment would result in an across-the-board salary increase for staff any given year as a challenge with the system.
“We shifted systems to a more unpredictable system so that we could benefit from it. Not so that we could suffer from it,” Norden said. “The reality is uncertainty is hard for people.”
If the market analysis does not result in an across-the-board increase in a year, staff members’ only hopes for a raise are by moving up the skill matrix or receiving a discretionary payment – but both of these can be difficult to come by, according to staff who spoke with The Campus.
Simpkins said one of his primary issues with the current compensation system is when employees are placed in too low of a salary band based on Human Resources’ interpretation of their job description.
“It feels as though if I hit the right combination of magic words in the job description, then maybe it gets bumped up,” he explained. “And if I don’t, out of luck.”
Supervisors are asked yearly to write an eight bullet point job description for each position in their department. These job descriptions are then used to benchmark the salary grade based on comparable positions at peer institutions.
One anonymous staff member described the challenge of accurately fitting all aspects of a person’s job responsibilities into an eight bullet point description, especially for staff who have had to pick up extra work since the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to Ellen Usilton, assistant vice president, human resources and people operations, the idea of the eight-point job descriptions is to focus on the most critical aspects of the position.
“Folks are pretty creative with those eight bullet points,” Usilton told The Campus.
Supervisors can submit a market verification to have Human Resources revisit the benchmarking of a specific position within the market. Last year, supervisors submitted 41 market verifications and 10 changes to salary grades for specific positions were approved, according to a May 2023 staff compensation update released by Human Resources.
Simpkins also cited concerns with the hard caps for employees who have reached the top end of their salary band. These hard caps often impact staff who have been at the college for a number of years, and can be extremely damaging to morale, he said.
Tim Parsons, landscape horticulturist and a member of the Staff Resources Committee, spoke similarly of the issues with the hard cap.
“It certainly is a sore spot,” Parsons said. “If you get to the top of your range, if you’ve been here a long time, you will only get a market raise each year. You are capped out.”
According to Goss and Usilton, however, the college must work within its financial means to balance prioritizing wages for its lowest paid employees and for employees at the higher end of their salary range. “At the end of the day, we have budgets and things that we have to meet, so all of those things have to come together at some point,” Goss said.
The college ran an $8.2 million deficit in fiscal year 2023, and is projected to run an $8.4 million deficit in fiscal year 2024. While the endowment draw has stayed consistently at five percent over the past three years, the amount of money directed to staff salaries increased by $3.1 million from fiscal year 2023 to fiscal year 2024.
Parsons described pressures on President Laurie Patton’s administration to shrink the deficit and grow the endowment after years of high spending and a high draw on the endowment under the past administration. Under previous president Ronald Liebowitz (2004–2015), in 2015 the college had an operating loss of 13.4% and drew eight percent from the endowment, compared to an operating loss of 2.4% in 2023, according to financial highlights presented to Staff Council in December 2023.
With the hard caps and disagreement over the salary bands in which some positions were placed, Simpkins described feelings among staff that the college is trying to push out higher-paid, longer-serving staff to achieve savings.
“I have talked to staff who feel as though the college is sort of balancing the books on the backs of staff,” he said. “And that doesn’t feel great.”
According to Goss and Usilton, the skill matrix system is meant to give more discretion to supervisors, who interact with their employees frequently and know their employees’ work well, in determining compensation. Supervisors make preliminary decisions as to which of their employees will receive a skill matrix bump or discretionary money, and those decisions are then approved by the vice presidents for each department.
Twelve percent of Middlebury employees moved up in the skill matrix system during fiscal year 2023, according to the May 2023 compensation update.
The intention, Goss said, is that supervisors have a thorough understanding of the skill matrix system and its application through meetings of the Leadership Alliance and Skill Matrix Workshops, and they are equipped to apply the system properly in their respective departments.
According to the anonymous staff member, however, having a supervisor who is not tuned in to the functioning of the skill matrix system seriously impacts an employee’s prospects for progression at Middlebury.
“If you are someone who is stuck with a manager who doesn’t manage, you’re stuck. And that will directly impact your potential, your career trajectory,” the staff member said. “The system is only as good as the people who are responsible for executing it.”
Norden described one benefit of the skill matrix system being the way it can be adjusted in its application for different positions across different areas of the college. At the same time, she said, this can make it challenging for the skill matrix to be applied evenly across departments, and for employees to see a clear trajectory of career progression at the college.
“There’s not really career development, per se,” Norden added. “Depending on the position, you may have to either move to another employer, or another institution that is larger.”
Goss cited the four steps in the skill matrix as representing the arc of an employee’s career at Middlebury. Staff can also move into a different role and then progress through the skill matrix in that new role, she explained.
“We have seen lots of examples of people being able to move around and opportunistically look for that,” Goss said.
Norden called for more of a focus on career development, workshops and trainings for Middlebury employees. It can be difficult for staff to take on such continuing education on top of their heavy workload, Norden said, but she described it as a way for people to progress in their careers when there is only so much that can be done for compensation with limited budget dollars.
Career development opportunities at Middlebury include the staff development fund, which helps fund courses, workshops or training programs directly related to an employee’s position at the college, and the continuing education fund, which allows staff to study at any accredited program or university related or unrelated to their current field of employment.
Despite concerns with job benchmarking to salary grades, hard caps and the opportunity for career progression, staff spoke highly of Human Resources’ willingness to discuss compensation with staff and the benefits package which Middlebury provides its employees.
Jared Rawson, a team liaison for custodial and support services and a representative on Staff Council, described the college’s efforts to put its best foot forward and listen to staff voices, amidst the financial constraints it faces as an institution.
“There is a positive changing of the mindset of whether or not you can reach out and tell somebody and know it’s not going to come back on you negatively,” Rawson told The Campus.
There is no perfect compensation system, but coming from previously being employed in the real world, Middlebury is a good place to work with its benefits, the flexibility it provides families and its opportunities for improvement, Jim Zieger, an HVAC mechanic and Staff Council representative, said.
“They have the best of intentions. They are struggling against a small deficit and trying to figure out how do they balance the scales, but I do think they are making huge efforts and I have to commend them for that,” Zieger added.
Simpkins described the conversations that must be ongoing between staff and Human Resources to ensure that college employees are supported and sufficiently compensated.
“We love the place. I have nothing but the greatest respect for the students and faculty and my co-workers,” Simpkins said. “We just want to make sure the place stays at the level I remember it being. I believe [Human Resources] has the same philosophy. We need to come together and listen to the two perspectives.”
Maggie Reynolds '24 (she/her) is the Editor in Chief.
Maggie previously served as the Senior Local Editor, a Local Section Editor, and a Staff Writer. She spent this past J-term interning for VTDigger, covering topics from affordable housing in Addison County to town government scandals. She also interned for Seven Days VT as an arts & culture reporter summer 2022 and as a news reporter for the Daily Gazette in Schenectady, NY summer 2021.
Maggie is majoring in History and minoring in Political Science and Spanish. She was a three-year member of the Women's Swimming and Diving team. Maggie enjoys running, hiking, and iced maple lattes.
