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Back in the day when I was chief pilot for a Midwestern telecommunications company, my official job title was senior subject matter expert. Not chief pilot. Senior subject matter expert.The company's pay structure had no chief pilot in it, so HR slotted me into the closest match it already had.I shared this example at NBAA-BACE during a session on job titles, descriptions and pay with my colleague Sheryl Barden of Aviation Personnel International (API).As many of you know, Sheryl has spent the past 25 years identifying talent for Part 91 roles, and I spend most of my days inside the compensation data HR teams use to price these jobs.The point of our session was to explain why a job title, no matter how impressive it sounds, doesn't set what you're paid.Spoiler alert: your job description does, so it had better reflect your actual responsibilities and the value you bring to your organization.Base pay is where everything startsSheryl opened the session by explaining that our discussion would focus on base salary. After all, base pay drives everything else. Your bonus is usually a percentage of it, your long-term incentives often are, too, and equity can depend on which pay band you sit in. That means if your job description puts your base in the wrong place, everything built on it is off, too.So how does your business aviation salary end up in a particular band? When I earned my CCP (Certified Compensation Professional) designation, I had to muscle through two full courses on exactly that. And it's not the most dynamic stuff in the world, I assure you.But the lesson stuck: HR ranks jobs by what's in the job descriptions, then assigns the titles.In practice, the compensation team compares the wording of your job description with the job descriptions in the salary surveys, looking for something like a 70% match.Whichever survey job you match becomes your benchmark, which then decides your salary band. And once you're slotted into that band, you tend to stay there.That's why our advice is to get the job description right before anyone tries to price the job.Why aviation salary surveys don't agreeNow let me show you my world. One major survey lists 19 job titles, another 26 and the third 32. Only four line up cleanly across all three. The rest take some parsing and a little interpolation.Take director of aviation. Two of the surveys split directors who fly from directors who don't, and the third uses one title for both.Or take captain and senior captain. What's the difference? "Whatever you want it to be," I told the crowd, "because it's not clearly defined."None of this is a knock on the survey providers. Each one samples a different slice of the industry, which is why you need more than one.What I do is watch the data set. When fewer organizations participate, some jobs look as if they took a pay cut. But how many people do you know whose company actually cut their pay? I don't know any.So please participate in a compensation survey, and more than one if you can.If you work for a corporation, your HR team can usually send the data straight from its HR information system. It's less of a headache for you, and it helps you and the rest of the industry.Same title, different jobSheryl brought the recruiter's view to our discussion. Since 2020, API has conducted 17 searches for aviation leadership positions, each one the top job in a flight department. Those 17 jobs carried four different titles, from director of aviation to vice president to director of a business travel center.That's a lot of variation, and it happens at all levels.One flight engineer posting Sheryl pulled asked for three years of experience and no supervision. Another flight engineer posting wanted a crew chief who mentors the team and oversees contractors."Same title, extremely different scope," as Sheryl put it. Yet both roles get priced against the same survey line.What the people doing the work told usBefore BACE, Sheryl and I ran a quick, anonymous pulse poll through our LinkedIn networks and got 133 responses, mostly from Part 91 flight departments.Most said their title and job description fit the work. When it came to pay, though, only half said it matches their responsibilities, and 37% said it doesn't.Managers stood out. Twenty-nine percent of them said their job description doesn't match their work, or that they don't have one at all.Keep in mind, our poll was a pulse check, not a scientific survey, and it can't tell us whether people are paid below market or just unhappy with their pay.But when people believe you aren't paying them for what they do, you have an issue. I'd argue it's a cultural issue as much as a compensation one.When the pay band runs outCompanies with rigid bands do get creative. Sheryl has seen flight departments make up the difference with a bigger bonus or more equity, and some build special pay bands for aviation.She's also sat across from an accountable executive who asked what a new director would cost and said, "That's as much as I make."Then there's the company that pays at the 50th percentile, period, which one attendee asked about during the Qandamp;A.My answer is the same one I give clients: you're accepting risk. Half the data set sits above you, so you'd better have something else to offer, like a predictable schedule.I've seen people turn down a $20,000 to $30,000 raise because the devil they knew was better than the one they didn't. They knew they could count on time off for family events, and the new job couldn't promise that.What to do about itStart the conversation with your boss. If it goes further, the people who matter sit on the compensation team.During the Qandamp;A, someone asked how to bring all this up with the boss without sounding blunt.I told them to blame it on us.Tell your boss you sat through a BACE session on job descriptions and want to talk about yours. I'm always happy to take the blame.Take these four questions with you:Which surveys do we use, and which survey title is my job matched to?When did we last update this job description?Is my pay tied to the job description, the title or both?Are we comparing to aviation surveys or general industry data?If the answer to that last one is general industry data, your comp team is missing the boat. Nothing else is granular enough to price these jobs.Then review your job description every year. Small changes creep in during the day-to-day hustle, and they never make it onto paper.Sheryl's one takeaway for the room was simple: "Every year quantify your job." Her advice to the bosses: "Don't forget to advocate for those who work for you."Pay follows the job, so make sure the paper says what the job really is.