176 Employment in the equine industry: Insights into job types, salaries, and education

The equine industry is host to an abundance of employment opportunities and in the US economy alone, the American Horse Council reports economic impact of $50 billion and close to 1 million jobs. Despite this, limited information is available on education and current salaries of equine professionals. In the summer of 2022, an online survey was conducted in collaboration with the Equine Science Society Membership Committee to assess current salaries, compensations, education levels, and job satisfaction of careers in the equine industry. A web-based survey consisting of 38 questions with conditional branching was created and distributed through social media and e-newsletters. A completion rate of 79% was observed with the majority of responses (n = 396) from North American (96%) females (84%). Survey branching focused on grouping participants by career type into the following categories: farm management, government, industry, nonprofit, private practice, and university. The most prevalent career type represented was farm management (34%) followed by private practice (18%), university (17%), industry (15%), nonprofit (12%), and government (4%). Associations between variables was examined with Chi-squared analysis. An association was observed between education level and salary (P = 0.001, X2 = 103.17) with salaries greater than$50,000 being more prevalent with advanced degrees. Similarly, job type and salary were associated (P = 0.001, X2 = 73.47), where salaries for university and industry careers were often greater than $50,000 and nonprofit and farm management salaries were more often less or equal to $50,000. For all career sectors, excluding government due to limited number of responses, there was a difference (P < 0.001) found when evaluating education, indicating that specific education levels are standard for each career sector. Data collected from this survey creates a baseline for evaluating compensation across the industry and exposed opportunities for improvements in future surveys. First would be the inclusion of more options for salary level brackets below $50,000; a majority (54%) of reported salaries were less than $50,000. Additionally, reorganization of job-type categories as there was potential participant confusion due to certain jobs overlapping into multiple categories. Outside of industry salary comparisons, survey data can be used by educators to emphasize the benefit of higher education in future employment success.