In this episode of the ATLIS podcast, we dive into the challenges and opportunities facing technology leaders in independent schools, with insights from a leader in educational technology recruitment. We explore the importance of advocating for the value of technology departments, strategies for career advancement, and the evolving expectations of technology leaders. Gain valuable perspectives on navigating leadership roles and fostering a deeper understanding of technology's critical role in schools.

Resources

• 12M & Ed Tech Recruiting, management consulting and strategic hiring for schools
• ATLIS Compensation Benchmark Report 2025
• ATLIS Interactive Compensation Benchmark Dashboard

Phil, welcome to Talking Technology with ATLIS,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host. Kristina Lewellen,

Hello everyone, and welcome back to

talking technology with Atlas. I'm Kristina Lewellen, the

President and CEO of the Association of Technology

Leaders in Independent

Schools. And I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey.

And I'm Hiram Cuevas, Director of Information

Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher school in

Richmond, Virginia.

Hello, gentlemen, and welcome. Finally,

to the end of January, we're dating our recording, and I

don't care, because this has been a very long month indeed.

We're going to get to our guests super fast, but I want to start

today and ask you to please tell me something good, because this

month has been a long one. So please, Bill, tell me something

good.

I got something because you already dated us.

I'm gonna say it, and I'm gonna upset a lot of people, I'm sure.

Oh no,

if you talk about football, go birds.

Go birds, eagles, bleeding green till the day I

die. Let's go. Let's beat the chief baby.

Grease the poles in the city. Reach

them up. Since

we're recording this ahead of the

Super Bowl, I definitely root for pretty much anybody who's

got the ball. I think it's a very impressive sport. And so

whoever's offense, I'm all about that team, but I do like the

chiefs, as does my husband, even though his granddad played for

the Packers. See, that's not allowed. I know, I know I'm a

fair weather football and I grew up in Buffalo, so like, dude,

like, I'm all sorts of mixed up. No, you can't like the chiefs,

but I think that we need to make a bet right now on the pod,

because we're recording on january 30. Here we go. If the

Chiefs win, I expect you to step onto the main stage at the Atlas

conference in a chief shirt.

No, nope. Come on. Oh no, that never happened. God,

no, never. What's

the matter? Bill, you you don't believe in

the birds. You don't think they're gonna win. I

do, but my wife wants to buy balloons to

decorate the house for a party. I will not let her bring

balloons into the house. Of both themes. I'm like, you're not

allowed to do it. I'd have to turn in my Philly card, and

there's no way I'm doing that. Sorry, that's the bet that

somebody that actually doesn't watch or follow football. That's

the bet you kind of make. No no, Hiram, I

need a tie breaker here. I feel like Bill

won't take my bet because I would have stood up with a bird

shirt on if they won. Yeah, but

you don't care. You're from Buffalo and you're

rooting for the chiefs. I mean seriously, and you've got, like,

family blood, stop.

I'm gonna kind of go with Bill on this one. You

know, he's a die hard fan. Thank you, Hiram. And the only reason

I say that is because my son is a die hard Chicago Bears fan.

And I mean, talk about a walloping for years and years

and years, and he is still wearing his bears regalia, and

he will not switch, no matter what

not happening. All right. Well, for

the hardcore podcast listeners, whoever wins the Super Bowl,

I'll make sure that I at least wear a suit of that color on the

stage at the Atlas conference.

Me and Kylie Kelsea, we won't put it on. We

were talking about that before the pod. She won't do it. It's a

sport. Travis, I won't, Nope, not gonna

do it. All right, I respect your stance.

Well, with that, it is time for us to welcome our guests to the

show. Today, we have Gabe Lucas with us. Gabe is a long time

friend of the pod and also a founder of Atlas, but we invite

Gabe here today in his capacity leading 12 M and Ed Tech

recruiting, he heads up some of the coolest searches that are in

our space, and I thought it would be really awesome to bring

him here and talk about what's going on in the technology

leader hiring landscape Gabe, welcome to the pod. Thank you.

And before we get kicked off, do you have an opinion about this

football nonsense?

Well, I'm out in California, so it's been

actually a disappointing Super Bowl. I'm sorry, can't root for

either team, basically rooting for a tie.

Ah, that's not how that goes.

But I do think if you stand behind your team, you

have to be willing to put out another team's jacket. So I'm

gonna actually go on your side. Kristina, on the back. Yes,

Gabe,

I love you. Thank you so much. I'm telling

you, I'm coming with a chief. I'm gonna bring Richards chief

gear with me to Atlas. All right, so Gabe, thank you for

joining us, and I'm really excited to kind of dive right in

with you. If we could, I think a lot of people know you. But for

newer listeners who are coming into our community, and there

are quite a few of them, could you please introduce your.

Yourself. Give us a little background on you and your firm.

Yeah,

so, I mean, I've been a part of the educational

community for about 20 plus years. I worked in higher ed. I

did work in a couple of independent schools out in

California. Ran technology departments back in 2014 Stuart

Kelsea and I came together and founded Atlas. Was a great

journey, still is, and out of that came just a realization, a

passion and sort of an idea for helping schools hire for

leadership roles in technology. So we started the firm, or I

started the firm as Ed Tech recruiting, and that was our

main focus, and really our only focus, and we still do that to

this day, but we also expand it to all areas, the heads cabinet

and now help schools hire leadership roles across the

board. And I think our trajectory sort of mirrors where

the industry has gone and that 1015, 20 years ago, you had to

have the technology expert, and you still do, but it was sort of

seemed like, well, everybody else can just be technology

phobic or technology uneducated or disinterested, as long as we

had a quote, tech person on our hiring leadership team, whatnot,

we're okay. But, you know, now there's sort of a blended

approach that's, I think, an exciting sort of where things

are headed, and it's where we've headed so that now we're running

a lot of searches that bring or fuse technology into other roles

and vice versa, and that's been great to see as there's now a

realization that high technology acumen is not just supposed to

be in one person. It really is responsibility of the entire

leadership team or the entire school to understand that these

are important issues affecting everybody. I

love it. And Gabe, what is kind of the lay of

the land lately? Like, what are you seeing in the hiring market?

What are schools sort of looking for, and is it changing?

It is. And of course, it's also case by case.

And I'm always sort of reluctant to kind of say, well, there is a

fad or a trend, or like everybody's doing this, but you

know, I'd be derelict in duty if I didn't say things like, cyber

security are much more important than they were five or six years

ago. Data strategy is much more important than it was even two

or three years ago, and the role of a technology leader is, for

sure, multi faceted. 10 years ago, when I was starting to do

this work and really explain to schools the complexity of

technology hiring, I talked about three areas of technology

instructional and IT and data systems in the middle, and that

was sort of revolutionary, like it used to be just it and Ed

Tech, right? And I think people got that, and that's how it is

today, but it's gone just not exponential, but it's certainly

gone far beyond those three prongs, and you have technology

leaders taking on major aspects of business operations because

they can think system minded. They can step into managing

functional units campus operations. But then you also

have technology leaders expand into roles like chief academic

officer and hive assistant head of school for Teaching and

Learning with a huge emphasis on technology. So that's been great

to see. Then we step back from all that. My advice very quickly

is that schools should define roles that are right for them.

It's so easy to do the copycat mentality they're putting in

smart boards. So should we? They're going one to one. So

should we, we saw that cycle decades and decades ago. What

I'm seeing now is there's a almost a comfort level of let's

define it for ourselves. We worked at the school last year,

they were all in to design and maker, and so for them, the

technology position had to just be totally interconnected with

that area of pedagogy and learning. But that's not right

for everybody, and that's okay. So you go back 20 years ago, it

was either it ed tech or maybe both, right? And there are sort

of three flavors. And now it's like, okay, there's a different

realization that there's so many aspects to what tech and school

means, and if institutional research is top of the game for

a school, they're going to define a role much differently

for one that's going to think about design maker. I mean, it

sounds so simple, but the realization of heads, that this

is okay is, I think, finally there, and that's come about,

going back to my point earlier, of realizing that everybody from

the head and the board on down, has to have a level of

understanding of technology so they can dip into this strategic

planning and not just say, Well, I don't know about it, so I'll

go hire somebody, and I won't think about it ever again.

Anyway, that is definitely in the rear view mirror, and that's

been great to see. So before we kind

of. Pivot over to the annual salary survey

and the resulting compensation report. Your firm and Atlas

partner up and do this report each year to benchmark industry

compensation and benefits. And so we're going to pivot to that,

and it's a big reason why we wanted you to come but I have

one more question, kind of high level for those who aren't

familiar with the model, who does the recruiter work for? Are

you working for the candidates? Are you working for the schools?

How does that work? I'll

answer the question in two ways. One, what

we do, but then I'll also say to those that are interested about

understanding sort of more behind the scenes. You know,

just different models, right? Who does the travel agent work

for? They their customer is the person to walk and for that's

sort of, again, a yes to your industry. But if you remember

those days, you've worked with the travel agent to book your

trip. So you the customer, were interfacing with them, but they

were being honestly paid by the industry, right? They would get

a some sort of partnership or payment through major travel

companies. Just thinking about that is a good realization to

recognize. It's not as simple as it might seem to the naked eye,

very simple for us, though we are an executive recruiting

firm, our official status, if you will, is that we're a non

profit search consulting firm. We're hired by our clients, and

which are not just schools. We're hired by colleges,

associations, even some for profit companies. So we get

hired by a client to run a search on their behalf. We don't

represent candidates. We don't place people. We're neutral on

decisions, and I'll even go further, we don't get paid $1

more if someone has hired external, internal, someone we

knew or didn't know. So in our little world, at least our

company, to anybody who will listen, I say, Yeah, we are

hired by our client. And if you go an agent or a consultant of a

in this case, say, at school, but we're helping that client

make decisions, and thus we interface and interact with

individual applicants, but we don't represent them, and that's

very important. You know, it cuts both ways in that we're

neutral on the decision, but we also don't coach people, and we

don't say, Okay, well, I'm rooting for you, or you're in my

stable so I'm going to really try to get you placed over

there, and thus let me fix your documents and tell you what to

say. And we don't do that. Going back to the travel agent model,

there are many different types of agents, and some that are

actually, you know, hired by individuals. Now take the

sporting world, right? The sporting agent is hired by the

player, and they're there to advocate, you know, let's take

our Super Bowl world, right? Like Travis Kelsea might be best

friends with Tay Tay, but he's still got an agent, and that

agent is going to act on his behalf and really push the

employer, Kansas City Chiefs, to do certain things. And that

person's getting paid by traps. There are plenty of placement

firms out there, and actually, we all know some of the big ones

that have this model of, well, we're not paid a dime unless you

get hired. And they have a very different starting point

approach, and in a positive way, they are often advocating for

the individual. They're coaching, they're trying to give

feedback and they're not an agent or representative of the

employer. It gets a little murky when some companies, and I won't

say names, try to do both. They are both placing people and also

hired as agents or consultants to an employer. And that's where

I think, if you're an applicant, you really have to understand

the model you're possibly entering, or like the quote

search firm that is running or supporting the search, and who's

paying them, or who represents them or not. And do they do both

sides sometimes? And in this case, what are they doing? It's

very complex. So again, our little world, our company, is

very simple. We act on behalf of schools, and we run searches,

and we're completely neutral, and we love people to come in

and apply, but it can feel a little icky sometimes, when

somebody is thinking about it's going to be one model and it's

actually another. And I'll just say, you know, that's just the

way the industry is. But you have to do your homework and not

just make assumptions all

the way throughout. That's really helpful. Thank you

for that. That has cleared up

a lot of ideas questions that I've had floating

around about this. You know, being someone who has directed

people to your site when I know that they've been looking and so

on and so forth. But when it comes to the salary survey,

we're all filling it out. I know how I use it. I'll fill it out,

I'll look at it, and then I'll benchmark myself and just see

where I am at this point. I've been in the game for quite a

while, so I know generally where I will fall so on and so forth.

Or if I'm talking. To somebody, whether it's through the ALI

program or somebody locally, you know, I'll have them reference

that. So if they're starting a search in general areas, what

they can do to get an idea of where things may stand from that

perspective, but turning this on you in a way of somebody who's

administering this and then working with Atlas to kind of

crunch all the numbers. How do you, as the person who has the

firm, I know how I use it. I know how Hiram probably uses it.

How do you use that data in the work that you're doing, whether

that's on the school's behalf? How are you putting that into

play? It's a

great question, and that's just it, like, how

each person uses it, I think, is a little bit different. And

that's what's so great about the person who is trying to seek a

job might have one objective function. The person who's in a

job trying to benchmark or see if they're raises or

commensurate, or if they're, shall I say, under market value,

that's an important thing. How we use it is very simple and,

quite frankly, very straightforward. The one and

pretty much only time I need to think about salary is when a

client has engaged us to say, hey, we're going to run a

search, and we work with them to figure out director of ed tech

or CIO or Information Systems Manager, whatever it might be.

Well, the obvious question, what should the salary be? And that's

a very simple question with a difficult either answer or just

requires a lot of analysis and thought. So that's the way I use

it is to help our clients figure out how to position or post a

salary range that is reasonable. Now I should emphasize help our

clients. It's not my decision what the salary is, and so I can

only do so much to say to a client, well, this is what I

think market rates are. This is where others who are. You know

the person who has a portfolio of what you're looking for. You

know the person who manages a team of eight, oversees all

areas of technology, working in a 1200 person school, they're

making x. Now you only seem to want to pay y, and y is less

than x. So, you know, do we have a problem? Well, I mean, it's

more like it's going to be a bit of a challenging search, because

the people you're looking for are up in the X land. So I'm

going to give you more than you bargain for again, we our

contracts and our little firm, they're fixed costs. So I mean,

we literally are just paid a fixed fee to help our clients

run great searches. I have no skin in the game personally, to

raise the salary so I'll make more money. Yes, certain firms

do pay a percentage or get a percentage, and that's cool, but

that's not our model. I don't want to look like I'm trying to

jack the seller up so I get more money. So the advice I'm trying

to give our clients is truly a market trip. Look, you're

looking for the X people. You only want to pay y. We're going

to have to figure out, like, well, maybe we got to pull a

different lever. Are you willing to let the Y person work one day

from home? Are you willing to maybe rethink the scope of the

job in such a way that part of those duties will go elsewhere?

Are you willing to get a little creative on relocation or

vacation or something? So if not, that salary analysis tells

me this is going to be a challenging search, and tells

the client, I don't know if you're going to identify the

right people that you're looking for. So it's very important,

very helpful to us in that very specific case. But I would just

say to others, there's a lot of reasons to use it, and I hope

you explore it and leverage it, because I think it helps make

better decision making across the board. That's

so interesting, Gabe, and that

actually leads me into some of what we saw in this year's data.

We'll get into some of the specifics on the salary side,

but first, I just want to ask for your feedback on this. In

our executive findings, our executive summary findings, we

have started asking about overall job satisfaction. And

the data which was collected in late 2024 compared to the same

data in 2023 there's some concerning dips in overall

satisfaction. So in last year's data, we asked technology

leaders to kind of rate overall their job satisfaction, and it

was at 92% okay, that's pretty healthy, right? It dipped down

to 83% this year, not a surprise. And then we asked

about the respondent satisfaction with their work

environment. Like, specifically, like, how's your work

environment? That dropped from 89% to 79% so across every

measure, even at the very bottom end of the spectrum, Gabe, like

the career advancement opportunities, we asked about

that last year compared to this year last year, asking about

career advancement opportunities, they reported a

62% satisfaction rate. This year it dipped all the way down to

41% and finally, I just want you to reflect on with flexibility,

asking about that aspect of satisfaction, last year's data

gave us a 53% so. Satisfaction rate this year, we're down to

30% when it comes to flexibility. Your thoughts on

that? Well,

I guess I'll give thoughts that have a silver

lining, mindset that maybe actually brings a sort of a

negative or a bummer, which is that across the board, these are

the trends. In other words, if you had asked me to do a similar

survey around like division heads, because we do a lot of

academic searches, it's probably about the same. These are roles

that are just getting more frustrating, harder to run. The

To Do list is going up and up and up. The expectations that

you know someone be the magician or the ace of all trades. Forget

even Jack, right? It's really trending, I think, a little bit

in the wrong direction. Now, I don't want to be a complete

Negative Nelly, and I think there are silver linings on the

positive side, but just to step back, I think it's helpful to

know that there's just a difficulty in school leadership

positions across the board. We're working with NAIS and I

case and other organizations on just like leadership pipelines.

I just gave a session last week, and people are just staying on

the sidelines. They're stepping out. It's challenging. So the

point there, number one, is just, I think there's comfort in

a shared recognition that running schools is hard. I think

the technology position, as we talked earlier, because it's no

longer society or ed tech, and it has so many aspects to it,

from AI and cyber, just take those two things right? There

are these frontiers of desired exploration at the board level,

all the way down to the teacher level. I mean, 25 years ago, how

many people in schools were just talking about, like, Apple 2e

even knew what that was, other than the six people were in some

locked room. So now you have everybody talking about these

trends and looking for the expert to get a sense of, like,

you know, where are we headed and where should we be? And that

just, I think, puts a lot of strain. So we have to go educate

the larger industry to realize, like, the technology position

has so many components to it. And let's go back to

compensation. If you want somebody really good, you need

to recognize that this is as critical as your CFO. You know,

my little soap box is that it's a little disappointing that I

think schools are still trying to say, well, we have the head

and the CFO and the advancement person and admission, so they're

bringing the dollars, but the tech person is like, one notch

down. We got to realize this person is as important, if not

more, than some of those other roles. So I don't want to get

into what is more important, not but the recognition of value.

The irony is, there are a lot of people who want these jobs.

These are exciting roles, but then you know things like, is

the salary really commensurate or not, are the expectations

commensurate? And then the burnout? There's a lot of

burnout. And we run searches where there can be these

exciting, 345, year turnarounds, and that's okay, what both sides

recognize. Hey, if you're willing to say, come in and work

hard, this can Springboard or something great, and a lot of

schools don't feel they need a 20 year person to stay. So if

you're burning out, it's almost like, to me, time to think about

another role. But I just want our industry to recognize the

value of these positions a bit more than it does, and I hope

this salary survey moves the needle there. But I think we

have to do a better job educating non technology school

leaders that you're asking for a lot you need to recognize the

value of who you're bringing in. Gabe,

I'm really pleased to hear that you mentioned that

tech leaders should be in the same ballpark as some of these

other leadership positions. I mean, I think about some of the

compliance issues alone that provide such tremendous risk to

our institutions, by itself, the number of times you have to deal

with attorneys and dealing with contracts, etc, that impact the

entire school, not just say, a division or a department, is

quite vast. My question for you is within the salary survey, you

mentioned that there's an undervaluing perhaps at some

schools about their tech leaders in terms of the salaries. What

is your perception about the overall landscape of tech

leaders within the survey in terms of where they're

positioned with respect to other senior leadership positions at

their schools?

Yeah, it's a great question.

I think a lot of that comes to the function of

the head. I mean, what I've seen just in my 10 years of work is

that if the Head of School sees the high value of this position,

they are going to bring that position into the even the upper

eche. Law The Executive Cabinet, they're gonna run a search, and

I'm not trying to put any clients under the bus, but I

mean some heads lean into working with us even more

because they're like, I know, like, this is gonna make or

break my school in the next five or six years. And what I also

like is when they sort of don't know this, what they're telling

themselves is okay, but I gotta lean into this area. I'm not

gonna just, like, push a button and like, Wait for five people

to show up and I'll pick one of them. And like, no, like, this

is hard work to get the community to recognize how

critical this role is. So the status of the position is number

one, a function of where the head sees it. You just have to

call a spade a spade there. I think other things can play a

role, but I think the technology professional is probably the

number two like, in other words, they themselves can self

advocate, but in that proper way. And I mean, look, I've been

in this industry. I've been a tech director. We love to flock

together. So like Atlas, to me, was like finding our peace. It

brought a group together that was connected virtually in some

ways. But like now, we have a professional association. We

have to go out in the world and evangelize, if you will. In

other words, the interconnectedness that we have

to do is to be more present, for example, at conferences that are

non technology. I'm not saying don't go to Atlas. And then when

you get those people coming to Atlas, I don't want non

technology senior leaders to sort of see this as like, well,

I don't need to know this. And I got somebody here who's doing

it, and they had the little pond, and I have my pond, and

we'll just do our thing, like, that's not going to lead to a

recognition that the issues that we're talking about are relevant

for everybody. So like, when I see Atlas putting on a think

about cyber or I saw an email and it was this morning, right?

Like, you know who owns your data, they happen to come in my

inbox today, I would argue more non tech people should be in

that session or listening than tech people. In other words, an

interesting little analysis would be if 95% of people who

show up are tech professionals, that's actually bad, or that's

good in some way, but it's leaving a whole slice of the pie

out, and whose responsibility is that, I think that has to be

with the tech director, the CIO, to bring along people to not

accept things like, Oh, well, you go do that, and I'll go do

this. No, no, you're all doing data. You're all using it. You

need to hear this. I remember when I was in the school, like,

I just sort of got almost not jealous, but I was, like, I got

percolatingly Excited by like, what my CFO is doing. Oh, my

God, she's talking to a lawyer. I want to talk to a lawyer. How

cool, right? Like, I'm not a CFO, but I want to hear what

they're talking about. We have to do that too. That's the next

level. And like I said, yes, the head plays a role in the stature

the tech person, but the tech professional themselves has to

do some creative things to not just say, I got my peeps and now

I'm good. No, it's like, I've got a starting point. But you

need to come hear this. You need to come hang with us. 20 of us

need to do that, so I don't just bring my one head of school and

that person feels like a fish out of water. Easier said than

done, but I think it just conceptually recognizes a

blending of these issues among multiple conditional groups. And

then I think the stature, the tech position, the CIO, the tech

director, goes much higher.

So Gabe, I imagine you're encountering schools all

over that continuum, oh yeah, yeah,

which is exciting and challenging, or just it

creates for like, a steady stream of work. And it's not

cookie cutter, because it's a function of the head, the board,

the school, the faculty, where that tech professional is the

success of the department. And there's a lot of things that I

think play into this. And look, I get the fact that schools

today, a lot of them are focused on survival, market, funding,

finance, like the dollars at stake are high, yes, yes and

yes. But a tech director, cio anything, even a systems manager

could just flip a switch, set a policy, if you will, and have a

tremendous impact on either user satisfaction or use your

frustration. And I don't mean open a firewall or doc, but

whatever it is right we can or can't install applications on

our computers, or what device is bought, or are we going to allow

this system or not? Or there's so many things. So this role is

so important, and yes, there is a tremendous continuum, but the

tech professional has so much influence. On the success of a

school they set an established culture. They can essentially

move that continuum with almost like a push of a button, or

we're going to buy this, or we're not going to, or we're

going to allow that, or not. That's a lot of power, and I

hope that they are using that ability influence to explain to

their peers how important technology is, but then we have

to get those people to recognize these decisions are not just

meant to be made by one person. And it's that intermingling that

I think will help move a school forward, but also help the

technology professional advance their either career goals or the

stature of their position.

So looking back at the data, Gabe, we've

had several years where we saw pretty significant increases in

salary. So from 2019 to 2024 as long as we've been creating this

report, the overall increase has been more than 15% Wow. But this

year we leveled off. This year we saw a slight decrease. I

mean, I don't want to call it a trend. One year is not a trend,

right? But we saw a less than 1% decrease in average salary from

around $108,000 a year to $107,000 a year. And again, over

the last several years, it's been going up pretty

significantly, but it's something maybe worth watching.

I'm hopeful that maybe some of that is reflective of more

individuals using this kind of data. Do some of the candidates

and some of the schools actually know about the compensation

report, and do they also leverage this data ahead of you

bringing it to the table? Well,

they do. We're working with schools when

they're hiring. We're focused on the hiring moment when it's time

to set a salary for essentially, a transition. We don't do a lot

of work with schools on, like, resetting internal salaries

based on who's there. We help do some like, analysis of

positions, but we usually don't get into like, is this person

overpaid? Underpaid or not. Usually they're on your page.

Quite frankly, I'm going to again give you that statement I

made about 15 minutes ago, which you may not want to hear, but I

definitely see it across the board, which is, I mean, I can

think of literal carbon copy searches, and we don't carbon

copy a position statement. But like today's 2025, search with

client X. It's a mirror image of a search we ran three, four

years ago, and I used the four year ago search as an example to

the client to go, this is your search? And they're like, yeah,

that totally is. And then it's shocking, like, I don't think

they're literally copying that salary that was posted, but it's

amazing that the salaries have not increased in the market

search world that we used to see. I mean, I was seeing jumps

678, years ago, which were great. Now there's sort of a

leveling off, and we're also seeing that with division head

searches. Those are really tough. I'll tell you right now,

they're not going up at the level that I think they should

be. So I wish I had greater analysis, but I'm just not

seeing the salary increases across the board. But with the

technology position, it's tougher also, because, yeah, it

may be a carbon copy, but the points we discussed earlier, the

level of risk that this person is managing is way higher, and,

quite frankly, the ready to pounce is really higher the

moment like something goes wrong. So that's a problem.

We're seeing that here's what we do. We also push our clients to

look at public salary postings in industry or other nonprofits,

just to see, like, Okay, you're about to enter the public

market. How are others posting this position? You cannot just

do what you did three or four years ago, or what your peers

will do three or four years ago, like, use the salary analysis

that we're doing with Atlas. Use external just analysis in

general, look at your internal salaries and then realize that

this role has changed dramatically. Unfortunately, I'm

often that don't shoot the messenger when I'm talking to a

candidate that's like, Well, yeah, it is what it is, but I

totally get it.

You know, the one thing that is holding

true year after year with this data is that the biggest impact

you can have to drive your average salary up is to be on

the senior leadership team. Yeah, of a school, that gap is

massive. So if you serve on the senior leadership team at your

school, so often, that means reporting to the head, but if

you are considered a senior administrator, your average

salary in 2024 was more than $126,000 and that's compared to,

if you are not a senior administrator, the average

salary is $96,000 annually. So I think that what's interesting to

me, at least in year after year after year, there's all sorts of

drivers, right? You can look at this data from what kind of

school it is, how big it is. What the enrollment is, what the

average tuition is, what kind of population you serve. There's

tons of ways to slice the data, but the one that seems to be the

most impactful to me is, do you report to the head IE, or do you

serve on a senior leadership team at your school? If so,

you're probably likely to make more money.

And look, there are two sides to that coin.

You're going to make more money and you're going to have more

responsibility. Again, we're neutral. Once again, we're

neutral here, because for some schools and candidates not

having the tech the on the seat Adam team is the right thing.

The school might say, Hey, that's not quite what we need

for whatever reason. But there are plenty of candidates who go,

I don't want to be exposed to all of this, I want somebody to

oversee, and that's great, but I think those that are seeking

growth and looking for that next level, I want to expand their

career, and possibly want to go into headship or other lanes of

oversight that you have to find ways to get on That senior admin

team, because that is a doorway to so much higher levels of

strategy, strategy planning being neutral. If the technology

person is not on the senior admin team, I will knock on the

door of a senior admin team to say, well, then who is highly

technology fluent? An idea is not just one person, but where

is that strategy coming from? And if you don't have anybody in

here who is really equipped to think about these issues, and

you've put this technology position kind of shoved into a

box, you're asking for a lot of trouble, or at least no that's a

different level of risk that you may not be aware of, but that

needs to be brought out front and center. The growth thing is

really important, and it's tough, because if you're not on

the senior admin team and your head is not really recognizing

this is an important either area or it's not their comfort zone,

you'll burn a lot of political capital while trying to make

that happen. And sometimes you just have to look elsewhere and

recognize that there's an opportunity down the street,

down the next state, you can switch from Eagles fan to Kansas

City Chiefs fan, and move to a city where there is going to be

recognition of your position. And there you go. If you're

willing to switch jerseys, sometimes that's what you got

to do. Gabe, we're not switching jerseys. Okay? We

just need to leave this one alone.

I know you're not gonna do that.

So I do have a question for you, because you're

touching on a lot of things in terms of where you need to sit

on the senior leadership team, in terms of how that pulls out

the value that we as technologists bring into the

schools. And you know, I've been involved with Atlas for a while,

to many different levels. You know, I participated early on in

the E cat program, moving on to the ALI program, working on the

T list program, really to develop those areas where we can

help build skills and build fluency, build some recognition

around the fact that, okay, this is what you're doing. So what

I'm going to do is, I'm going to ask you to kind of put on the

candidate hat for one piece of this and then put on the school

hat on another one. In terms of, what would you say to the

candidate? In terms of, what are the things that you need to

focus on to elevate yourself to that level, like participate in

AI, look at the T list, stuff do X or Y, things. You know, what

are those things that you would say to the candidate? And then,

what are the things that you're saying to the school that listen

you're saying you want all these things. This is what you need to

look for, or these are the questions that you need to be

thinking about and asking of those candidates. So taking that

from both those perspectives,

yeah, great question for candidates, having

supervisory experience is really important. And if not going to

some certification program that is going to teach you managerial

skills, one of the number one things is, can you manage? Can

you lead people? And I think the beauty of either an Ali or a T

list or any program is that it's going to hopefully develop

leadership management skills in this domain. And let's get

really specific. How would an ed tech person oversee an IT ops

manager or a network administrator? Because that

happens. Or how might a CIO who came up through the ranks of it

lead an ed tech unit? So that's a fluency that is just

essential, and especially true if you, let's say you're the CIO

and you never wait, taught in the classroom, but you need to

lead ed tech vision, or if you're the Ed Tech professional

who's never really been that hands on with it, but you need

to lead an IT unit, or some sort of it functional team. So that's

probably number one. Number two would be ability to lead change

management initiatives. Always tell the story, right? This one

guy in a search, you know, we asked him a question like, how

would you lead a phone system migration? And it sounded like

he was basically saying, I go down to Best Buy, buy a bunch of

units, and within 30 days, they'd all be installed. So. Oh,

my God, you don't even understand change management,

technology, downtime, Christmas break, testing, sandbox

environment, so just the lack of awareness of what it means to

manage technology change, and thus, on the positive side,

again, any certification program or learning experience, teaching

somebody the fundamentals about how to manage technology

transition, I think then there's probably three. Would be just

fluency beyond talking points, but a reasonable level of

understanding of across the board issues, whether it is

cyber security, data privacy, institutional research, and then

let's go on the ed side, just general practices on, like

instructional design, how to work with faculty. You know,

faculty can sniff out somebody who's going to come across as a

Genius Bar. Actually, that's like the number one metaphor, or

sort of descriptive, like, we don't want that genius bar

person. And they'll say, you know, with that hat or whatever,

like, We want somebody who can just, you know, how do they

talk? Teach it. And that, I think, is important. But then

take that to mean also, like, for the other side, how do you

talk administrator, like somebody who's able to talk to a

CFO or an admissions professional, and like not come

across as IT support plus. But how do you present yourself as a

true senior administrator? I always say like Your resume

should look like you have the job that you're trying to get,

not that you have. And when you're talking to senior

administrators, you should sound and look. This isn't like sort

of a visual, but like, you should present yourself and your

ideas and your framework in such a way that basically you are

talking as if you are the CIO, if that's trying to get from the

school side, schools, I think, need to really be willing to not

pitch and hold these positions into one lane or another, and be

much more open to a variety of experiences. And they're too

quick to say, well, they haven't taught high school or, you know,

they don't see a certification of, like, they don't know how to

use, you know, network equipment, like, there's too

many check boxes that they are looking for on resumes. And

we're trying to say there is so much more to this person's job

or role that you don't understand, and you need to be

much more open to, like, a variety of experiences and

backgrounds. We're getting there, but it's taking a long

time, and I think people are just looking for like, the

unicorn that doesn't exist. And we have to convince them like

you need to give people a chance to present themselves in their

full light and not just sort of go off of a resume.

I love that. Yeah, we know a couple unicorns.

I host the podcast with a couple of them. There you go. Gabe,

this was so helpful. And I always love taking a moment to

kind of talk through the annual compensation benchmark report

findings with you. I appreciate your partnership on gathering

that data, and I just feel like the nuggets that come out of it

are so useful to our community. They help folks advocate for

themselves, and certainly inform schools to approach some of

these big picture questions with a lot more information. So I

thank you for that, and I thank you for joining us. For those of

you who are interested in getting your hands on the

compensation benchmark report that's available in the show

notes, and I hope that you use it at Atlas. We always love to

hear about how you're using it. A lot of times at our

conference, folks will come up to me or my team and say, you

know, use the benchmark report and I got a raise, or I

advocated for another staffer, and so those types of movements

of the needle just really bring me a lot of satisfaction. I love

hearing those stories, so continue to let us know how

you're doing with that. But Gabe, thank you so much for

being with us today. It's really useful

My pleasure. Thank you all very much. And go

birds chiefs or whoever you rooting for, and you

could have stopped with the first one, Gabe, you

were you were all good. I

know I had to cover all bases. I'm sorry.

It's a good thing that he doesn't have

editing rights to this podcast.

We represent nobody, so you know, that's

right.

He's a neutral party. Thank you, Gabe.

We will see you at the annual conference. See you that

this has been talking technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of Technology Leaders in

Independent Schools. For more information about Atlas and

Atlas membership, please visit the atlas.org if you enjoyed

this discussion, please subscribe, leave a review and

share this podcast with your colleagues in the independent

school community. Thank you for listening. You.