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Overseas travel. How much does it pay ?

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by eujay 2 views

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I was at a job interview at which I was told there would be 20% travel. The locations will be national and international. Lenth of stay is ussually no greater than a week, 2 weeks away from home is the absolute maximum.

Salary being offered for this job is $45 to $55 K. In other words $50K. I asked if there is any compensation per trip and the answer is no. All expenses are paid but thats it. The company has a good 401K and other benefits.

SO my question is how much does this kind of job pay ? Is $50K average, low, high ? What ?

What do you think.

The job is not an IT job but is pretty technical. If I was hired I will be the support person for a Blood Plasma freezing and unfreezing machine.

Locations mentioned as possible locations were Europe, (sales are expanding there), South America, (Rio), Japan and Paris France. The company is in Scaramento, North California.

I think $50K is good for the job if I were to stay at home but if I'm going to spend time in other countries I think more should be offered.

Any feed back welcome.

Thanks in advance for your help

Eujay

3 replies

by ebob

$50K might be a lot, or it might be average or it might be low. It depends on your industry and your local job market.

I travel globally a LOT for business. I don't get paid any more (or less) than the person in the next cubicle (when I'm in) whoalmost never travels. Do I care? No. I get paid fine for what I do. The employer values my efforts to the same extent as the cubicle neighbour. So we get paid the same.

And when I travel on business, I try to "take advantage". After I proved myself, I was able to negotiate staying over a weekend here or there and "play tourist", and my employer picked up the hotel and restaurant bills. Actaully, because I stayed over a Saturday night, the airfare was typically discounted to more than make upfor it. So the company gets 2 things: a happier employee and a marginally lower expense report.

by pandadude

That sounds great to me...at least the traveling part. Those are real nice, charming places they want to send you. Don't you like traveling ? Then of course I'm single...
But if their businesses ae mostly in 3rd world, developing countries...that's a different story.

by eujay

Thankyou to both of you for your replies.

I don't mind travelling with my wife and family. But I don't like being away from them. I'm thinking if I took this job I'll be in another coutry missing my family and wondering if I should have taken anIT job here in Sacramento.

I guess my gripe is that IT jobs, (unix system administrator and so on), pay 50K or greater. While I am not at that level yet I know that with more certification and just a little more experience I could be. So from mypoint of view if I can get 50K staying at home then shouldn't I be paid more for going overseas ?

My worry with this job is that it will turn out to be a lot more thanm 20% travel. At the interview I was told that the reason why this job is openis because "My other two engineers are on the road the whole time and there's nobody here to support our customers" So I'm guessing that if either of the two existing engineers quits or decides they don't want to travel anymore then I will have to take their place until a replacement can be hired and trained up, ( ie an indefinite amount of time).

If I was a single guy then this would be a great job, if it was garuanteed that travel was not more than 20% that too would be OK, but for a married guy a lot of time away from home is bad news so I'm thinking twice about taking this job.

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