Note from the Associate Editorial Director: A sneak peek of 2023 CDI Salary Survey data

by Linnea Archibald

I often call the annual CDI Salary Survey one of our “tent pole publications.” Outside of position papers and white papers, which come out on a rolling basis based on the needs of the community and the work of the ACDIS Advisory Board, the Salary Survey, the CDI Week Industry Survey, and our bimonthly CDI Journal editions are the things we plan our editorial calendar around. It’s the scaffolding that holds the rest of the canopy of our content up throughout the year.

While much digital ink has been spilled recently regarding CDI Week and the newest edition of the CDI Journal, I wanted to spend this week’s note sharing a few sneak peeks from our forthcoming 2023 CDI Salary Survey, which we hope will be published at the end of this year.

Of course, the biggest thing the Salary Survey addresses is compensation, and this year’s results show that CDI professionals (all titles) can be expected to make $90,000-$109,999 annually (35.67% of all respondents); in 2022, only 29.54% of respondents fell into that same category. Encouragingly, the percentage of CDI professionals who fell into the lowest salary categories ($59,999 and below) decreased from 2.50% in 2022 to 1.75% in 2023. Hopefully, this indicates that organizations are recognizing the value that CDI professionals bring to the table.

The Salary Survey also includes questions about promotions and raises, which can be leveraged if you are looking to advance in your career. According to this year’s results, 17.41% of respondents received a promotion and 78.46% received a raise in the last 12 months (compared to 21.49% and 81.04%, respectively, in 2022). This may indicate that, after a couple years of pandemic rebound and readjustment, the industry has begun to stabilize slightly, returning to pre-pandemic rates of promotions and raises. That’s not necessarily bad news, however, as still 58.49% of respondents said they have had no reductions in salary or non-monetary benefits over the last year, which is consistent with 2022’s results.

Supporting the overall sense of industry stabilization after several years of pandemic-related fluctuations, the percentage of respondents who reported planning to hire new staff in the next 12 months decreased slightly year over year from 49.10% in 2022 to 42.34% in 2023. That is still higher than pre-pandemic rates (37.02% in 2019), but could indicate CDI programs are returning to some semblance of normality.

Of course, the full Salary Survey report will cover far more than those few data points, but I hope that these tidbits piqued your interest and got your thoughts churning. The Salary Survey report will be published at the end of this year/early 2024 and typically includes about 10 pages of analysis and more than 40 charts and tables. It is well worth the wait.

If you’re interested in sharing your experience regarding professional development, compensation, or a related topic, we’re also looking for contributors on those topics for the January/February 2024 edition of the CDI Journal, so please reach out to the ACDIS team at info@acdis.org with your ideas and thoughts! 

Editor’s note: Archibald is the associate editorial director of ACDIS. Contact her at larchibald@acdis.org.