Pay for experts soars as revolution starts

A shortage of qualified people is part of the cause and there has been an increase in the number of interim pension managers needed.

Paul Battye, director at Moorlands Human Capital, said: “We’ve seen a lot of schemes going direct to their consultants because there isn’t the depth out there in the marketplace of people who are readily available to take these roles and assist with auto-enrolment queries.”

He said this issue could be compounded by some employers “sleepwalking” their way into the programme.

“I was speaking to a HR director the other day and obviously he realised they had auto-enrolment, but didn’t know that they were going to have to take someone extra on board to do the work for them. He genuinely thought it was just a case of telling payroll to do some extra work,” said Battye.

According to Sarah Bergin-McCarthy, director at recruitment consultancy Sammons, the appetite for good-quality candidates was leading to a growth in counter-offers, where a scheme manager has accepted a job offer, but their current employer had come back with a bigger salary to encourage them to stay.

She also noted that employers were not always seeking pensions expertise to deal with auto-enrolment. “When we’ve talked to them they’ve said, ‘We don’t necessarily want a pensions person,’ they might want a pure payroll person or a project person or a systems person.’”

One of the rumours in the industry concerns a payroll manager at a FTSE 100 company who has seen his salary double owing to the new levels of complexity he faces in auto-enrolling employees on fixed contracts, part-time hours and casual employment.

Despite this demand, experienced pension managers are likely to find interim work more lucrative in the future, according to Jeremy Williams, director at consultancy firm Agile Services.

The former pensions manager said: “It has been said that the future for highly skilled pension people is interim work. The company is less likely to pay top money to keep them all the time while the ship’s steady.”