Compensation
and BenefitsCornell

Certificate Program

The conversation around employee pay has changed over the years from one of base salaries, bonuses, and cash compensation, to a “total rewards” approach that seeks the right blend of monetary and non-monetary elements that will engage each employee while generating valuable business results.

Cornell University ILR School faculty Linda Barrington and Diane Burton are the thought leaders behind Cornell's prestigious Institute for Compensation Studies. This team of authors offers a learning experience that applies evidence-based, social science approaches to the field of compensation. This course will equip you with the tools and insights needed to apply a “total rewards” view to compensation that aligns with your organization's strategic goals and operational realities.

How does your organization determine how much to pay employees across their different roles? How do you balance the need to attract and retain talent with the need to promote internal pay fairness? It is crucial that your organization define clear answers to these questions.

Employee salaries are typically among the highest business expenses. Making compensation decisions in ways that attract the best talent and contribute to internal fairness is a major concern of human resource professionals. Some organizations have compensation structures in place, while others do not use them at all. This course provides a comprehensive overview of the use of compensation structures.

You'll start by exploring some of the philosophical concepts underpinning pay structures. You'll look at the decisions your organization will need to make before creating a pay structure. After you examine the philosophical and practical considerations, you'll see how to develop a pay structure. Professor Tae-Youn Park leads you through the process of building a pay structure for your organization, providing a step-by-step framework that you can bring back to your organization. He then gives you hands-on experience with developing a pay structure that matches both your organization's needs and its values. Along the way, you will discover how to collect, choose, and use market pay data.

Finally, you'll take a close look at some specific issues with pay structures. You'll discover how to use a pay structure to make decisions around employee pay. You'll explore the advantages and disadvantages of pay transparency. You'll end the course by identifying the various teams within your organization who need to be engaged to help manage pay structures effectively.

By the end of this course, you will be ready to make informed decisions about pay structures for your organization. You'll be able to assist senior leaders in articulating a pay philosophy and determining a pay transparency policy. You will also have the insights you need to advise senior management. Throughout the course, Professor Park weaves research-based information with practical advice so that you'll be prepared to guide your organization through the process of designing and managing compensation structures.

The following course is required to be completed before taking this course:

• Total Rewards Compensation

This course introduces the idea of benchmarking, or comparing your salaries to those of your competitors. Benchmarking is one of several factors that organizations use to determine employee pay. Additional factors include the organization's compensation philosophy, ways beyond salary that employees are compensated, and the organization's budget. Organizations need to strike the right balance of paying enough to attract and retain quality employees but not paying more they can afford.

In this course, you will explore the different salary surveys used in benchmarking analysis and how to decide what surveys are best for your organization. You will also examine strategies for reviewing and analyzing those surveys. Finally, you will consider how to use the results of your analysis to adjust salary structures and how to communicate the results of your analysis to the organization.

The following course is required to be completed before taking this course:

• Total Rewards Compensation
• Designing and Managing Compensation Structures

This course provides an introduction to employee benefits. Employee benefits is a key part of an organization's total rewards program, which also includes compensation and other valuable workplace experiences. Employee benefits is a surprisingly large umbrella of programs offered by an employer to the benefit of the employee and their eligible dependents, and every organization can tailor its benefit plan offerings to fit their employee populations and business model.

Throughout this course, you will be exposed to the major employee benefit programs and workplace experiences offered by American employers. You will explore the tremendous variation in how these programs are offered, both in terms of the programs themselves and the design features of each program.

The breadth, depth, and variation of benefit programs gives each employer the opportunity to design their benefit strategy and offerings to attract and retain their optimal employee workforce. The nation's top employers consider their employee benefits and workplace experiences to be key parts of their employment brand and overall human resources strategy.

The following course is required to be completed before taking this course:

• Total Rewards Compensation
• Designing and Managing Compensation Structures
• Benchmarking Competitive Pay Levels