Comments: Maximize Your Career Earnings: Get a Degree and Manage Your Career

On my post titled Maximize Your Career Earnings: Get a Degree and Manage Your Career, I had someone comment that the percentage increases I used for salaries seemed unrealistically high. His thoughts:

Your point #3 is puzzling. What line of work permits such phenomenally large percentage raises every year? Most companies I know of have a pretty restricted latitude regarding annual raises, with the maximum raise seldom more than a few percent above cost-of-living. In my experience, the only time one is able to get a substantial (10s of percent) raise is when you change jobs.

That, of course, just makes the improvement in starting salary due to education all the more important.

Here's how I responded:

These represent average amounts over the course of a career and take into account the combination of the following:

• Regular, annual increases - As you note, these are usually fairly low. If you rely on them only, it's likely you won't be able to achieve the higher rates I note.

• Promotions within the same company -- When people get promoted to new levels of responsibility, they often get pretty good bumps in pay. Companies I've been with provide 7-12% increases when a promotion occurs.

• Taking a new job with another company -- This is where you can really get a good increase. I've had up to 20% increase in one year by switching to another company.

Don't look at the increase percentages in the post as something you'd get EVERY year, but something you'll AVERAGE. For instance, the 10% numbers above don't mean that you'll get 10% increases every year, but some you may get 3%, some you may get 8%, others you may get 15%, and so on -- they'll average out to 10%.

And 10% is achievable -- I've done it. But you must actively manage your career, you can't sit back and just let it happen. That's the point of the post. If you do just sit back, you'll be in the lower end of the increase levels.

A couple key takeaways I'd like to reinforce with everyone:

1. Getting the higher level of annual increases takes work. You need to actively manage your career and be a solid performer. You don't earn 10% increases per year just by sitting around a doing only what's "required."

2. Taking steps to actively manage your career can have a HUGE impact on your finances. Just read Maximize Your Career Earnings: Get a Degree and Manage Your Career and see how the difference can be millions of dollars over your lifetime.

Comments

[Dale G.]

One of the easiest and most effective ways to go beyond what is required in your job is to learn from people around you about how to do things that aren't normally part of your job description but that need to be done, or at least should be. Learn how to document things that your boss needs in writing. If you have a friend doing a similar job at another company, find out what the job entails there. Chances are at least one of you could be doing something additional that the other one already does. Teach useful skills to coworkers and document processes that aren't fully described anywhere else.

The nice thing about this approach is that it is easy to identify where you are going to get the knowledge to go the extra distance. You can learn it from people you already work with and from friends with similar jobs. This is about how to improve your performance in little ways. Along the way, you will sometimes stumble over the bigger improvements. This is how to find the daily ones that add a few percent.