Salary Survey Extra is a series of dispatches that give added insight into the findings of both our annual Salary Survey and our smaller Salary Survey PLUS polls. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.

Do you have your sights set on 2017 yet? The new year is nearly upon us, and after the calendar finally turns over, we'll shift our focus to exploring data from the annual Salary Survey that wrapped up in mid-November. For a few more weeks, however, as the wheel of time rolls toward the end of 2016, we will still be pulling leftover data out of our most recent Salary Survey PLUS poll, about networking certifications.

Last week we reported on the correlation between salary and different levels of employment within the various organizations where networking professionals are employed. Salary is definitely influenced by organizational standing, so we made a rough calculation of what various job roles are worth. What can you expect to make if you're employed at the level of a manager, or senior specialist, or lowly rank-and-file employee?

This week, we're sticking to the theme of employment hierarchy. What we wanted to investigate this week, however, is to what degree experience affects where the average networking professional finds himself or herself in the organizational hierarchy. One of the questions that we asked survey respondents is how long they have worked in computer networking. So that gives us a general idea of professional tenure.

The next step was to correlate tenure to employment. Given a certain number of years of involvement in professional networking, where should you expect to fall in the hierarchy of your organization? As you'll see by scanning the results below, there are people at almost all level of employment no matter how many years of employment you have — although management is a serious longshot for those who've only been in networking six or fewer years.

If you're just starting out, you should probably expect to be at the level of an employee or specialist during your first four years in the profession. After that, there starts to be some upward mobility, with increasing numbers of professionals migrating up to the senior specialist level. Take a look and see what you think. What's the hierarchy like where you work?