What Should I be Earning?
We recently wrote about how to ask for the salary you deserve, but how do you know in the first place what you deserve? We obviously can’t tell you that, but we can give you some tips for finding out for yourself what your market value is, as it were.
We use the term ‘market value’ because, as an economic worker in the labour market, you are of value to employer organisations. Whether you’re in your first job or in the latter stages of an executive career, you have something of worth to offer to your current organisation—and your next employer—in terms of your labour. Your precise value is dependent on many factors. These include your level of experience, your education, your availability and your profession. The salary you can expect to get is also dependent on external factors such as your employer’s wage structure, the company’s organizational strategy, the position of the industry in general and other macroeconomic market forces. How can you even begin to go about assessing all these factors in order to come up with a figure you can realistically expect to earn?
There are a several ways of doing so. For instance, you can try to ascertain what the going market rate is in your profession or current organisation. Ask colleagues with similar roles to you what they’re earning. To get a wider idea of what’s going on in the sector as a whole, ask your equivalents in rival companies the same question. Of course, it’s important to tread carefully here because money is a really sensitive discussion topic. It’s probably best to stick to asking people you know well about this type of thing.
If you don’t know anyone in a similar role to you well enough to talk about this, tap recruitment agencies for information instead. Call agents up and ask them for a general ball park figure in relation to the salaries their clients are offering candidates for jobs such as yours.
Alternatively you can conduct your own desk research on the matter. Look at job ads in newspaper classifieds and on online job boards to see how much employers are offering for positions similar to yours. Look at your organisation’s website to see if its advertising jobs related to yours. If so, what pay level is it advertising?
It’s worth noting that finding out what you roughly should be earning is valuable not only for your own reference but also valuable as leverage in the actual salary or pay rise negotiations. Make a record of everything of interest that you find out during your investigations and work the data into the business case that you plan to present to your employer at the negotiation table.
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