[evilhei]

From your experience, what works the best when asking for a salary increase at your job? I mean how to argument the requirement the best, not just telling that I will quit if I dont receive this much. Is it ok to ask for more money if you provide more value than year ago? How it is the best to show your added value if your not doing sales or similar job that can easily be measured?

What works and what not?

[Days of Broken Arrows]

This isn't how I played it. The way I made a lot of money was by getting a salary job full time, refusing every promotion and doing bare minimum. I made extra money working freelance.

Here's why: my company really only gave 3 to 5 percent raises. I assume it's the same or worse now. With more money comes more responsibility and more hours. When I calculated the raise and extra time they'd want me working verses what I could make freelance, the freelance was way, way more money. I even worked from home most of the time, because it allowed me more time to freelance and kept me out of the office gossip loop which I found drained my energy. Best of all, it kept me out of the line of fire for promotions or raises, neither of which I wanted.

This also helped provide a safety net so that when I left my main job, I had tons of contacts and other ways to have money coming in. This might not apply to you, but it's what worked for me.

[Joga Bonito]

You should be tracking any accomplishments that you made on the team. If you cant quantify what you're doing try to at least figure out things you did on a successful project that contributed to its success. Ask someone you've worked with to help put it into words or articulate in a manner that shows you're pulling your weight.

Assuming you have some sort of goals set forth to you by your manager you should be working to completely blow those out of the water. Schedule one on ones periodically and ask what you can do better and make sure to follow through on that. Document any and everything that would make you look good like client satisfaction emails and the like.

I have also found that extending a hand to fellow worker or doing an exceptional job on a project will often have your coworker put in a good word for you on team calls. The most important thing is to realize that you have to come from the point of view of your manager. When presenting yourself always reference the value that you are adding to the team.

[w00t]

What Im planning to do next year is to move abroad and take my job with me. Right now my boss has to pay about 30% of my net wage as taxes. So I will ask him to pay me the full amount and let me handle tax myself. Since I wont have to pay income tax abroad ... boom 30% raise and I wont even have to do more work, to my boss its all the same but Im cutting out the gubment. Like Days of Broken Arrows mentioned a pay raise usually means you will have to do more work as well. In my old job I worked for almost 2 years and never asked for a raise since I was scared they might expect more from me lol.

[WestIndianArchie]

(06-29-2013 08:31 AM)evilhei Wrote:  

From your experience, what works the best when asking for a salary increase at your job? I mean how to argument the requirement the best, not just telling that I will quit if I dont receive this much. Is it ok to ask for more money if you provide more value than year ago? How it is the best to show your added value if your not doing sales or similar job that can easily be measured?

What works and what not?

I made more money when I asked this one question to my superivsor.

"How do I move up?" With more responsibility came more money. (the problem is, if you ever figure out your true value - you'll just be pissed off)

In your case, depends on a lot
- how is your company doing (if they're doing bad, no bueno)
- how are your peers doing relative to you (if you're not the star, no bueno)
- what's the industry doing - going up? going down? ( you build desktop pcs, no bueno)
- what's the market rate for someone with your experience (you're getting paid better than market, no bueno)
- what demonstrable things have you done (you haven't written stuff down, then you have nothing to bargain with)

100% of the time, if you're a good employee, you're making the company money - sales or not. A good admin, a good hr person, a good coder, a good programmer - and I don't even mean superlative - I mean getting the job done that you're being paid for is worth a whole lot. Whenever you get to management, you see how many piss poor hiring decisions you've made and how often times it's better to keep on a marginal worker that can half ass the job than to hire some new person and train them.

But even with all the economic logic on your side, they might say go fuck yourself..or "we'll see next year if you meet all sorts of pie in the sky goals and we'll never honor a commitment"

Most people are getting raises by going lateral. So if you really want a raise at your job, you've got to see if you can get another job that pays more money and see if they can match.

Having had the golden handcuffs on, be careful of what you wish for. Known plenty of well paid lawyers who weren't entrepreneurial. Even if they had great skills, they weren't worth anything w/o their own book of business.

Getting the job done in a half ass way seems to be good enough for lots of businesses nowadays. There's so much bloat, so much wasted effort and underutilized resources in the private sector....I digress

WIA

[theArbiter]

I'm going to repeat this again.

Have you heard of Ramit Sethi? Go to http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com. It's basically a career hacking and personal development blog (a bit different than what the bold website title itself suggests). He has a lot of premium programs that cost a lot of money, but his free material beats most of the paid material out there. Subscribe to it. Digest the info. You will be glad you did.

Here's a thing that very few people do in life because people tend to have a hard time shifting the center their thought process away from the ego:

Put yourself in the shoes of the other party. In this case, that would be your boss.

If I were your boss, why would I give you a raise?

There are many answers, but mainly, it is because you are a net asset to the company.

That is, do you cost the company more than you bring in? Of course, this is often difficult to quantify if you are in positions that are not directly revenue generating (analysts when it comes to investment banking, human resources, technical stuff like coding, etc.). If you are in a position like sales or lead generation, then this is pretty easy to quantify, but it looks like you're not in such a position. A good start would be, as already mentioned, to start tracking the accomplishments you have made to the team.

I'm getting a bit lazy, so I'll just embed a video for a starting point:

[2014]

figure your true value out.

I worked at a business where I was getting paid around $22 an hour plus some expenses. I worked out how much the customers were paying. how many customers I was seeing, for how long, the rent, the outgoings, every nook and cranny. everything. I was earning the business around $110 an hour minus some expenses. So let's round up my salary plus expenses to $30 an hour and round down their profit minus expenses to $100. They were making $70 an hour from me, as soon as I realised this, I left and started working for myself.

Money is obviously way better now

[evilhei]

Thank you for your replays. Working for myself and for more than one company has crossed my mind before. I will now look into it more seriosly. Also my field ERP consulting is field where it should be quite easy to find work on my

[WestIndianArchie]

(06-30-2013 12:42 AM)2014 Wrote:  

figure your true value out.

I worked at a business where I was getting paid around $22 an hour plus some expenses. I worked out how much the customers were paying. how many customers I was seeing, for how long, the rent, the outgoings, every nook and cranny. everything. I was earning the business around $110 an hour minus some expenses. So let's round up my salary plus expenses to $30 an hour and round down their profit minus expenses to $100. They were making $70 an hour from me, as soon as I realised this, I left and started working for myself.

Money is obviously way better now

This is like a universal standard. The org makes 4-5x what they pay you.

Once you realize this, the next question is how do I get clients.

WIA

[Architekt]

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[pegador]

The Ramit video is pretty good. What some people at work do (and what I have started doing) is keeping a diary of all the stuff that you do and notes about your team. Bring it to you review and keep it handy. If a particular subject comes up, you can always refer to it. It makes you look organized and dependable, and also really into what you're doing. Use it to show some of your accomplishments and where you add value...it's a kind of proof of your work and almost a justification for why you deserve a raise.

[kaotic]

I thought I'd bump this because I'm in a situation.

Worked for the company 3 years, inside sales support. Denied a raise about a year or so ago (I don't think I asked for it confidently enough)

Anyways, I'm hourly ($20/hr) typically get a bonus ranging $1K to $1.5K per quarter.

Boss and I go for a walk around our building. Tells me he's giving me more tasks and long term objectives, my role will be changing somewhat. He told me I'm getting a $1.5K bonus, sales reps like working with me, I blend really well with the company, and I play a major role.

My role has changed from minor marketing to being the jack of all trades for the sales team, they rely on me alot actually.

Boss also told me I'd be getting a raise of $2K. I told him I'm hourly, he was a bit surprised and asked why I wasn't salary. I told him that's how it's been for the past 3 years. He wants to move me to salary he said we'll figure out the raise later (perfect for me)

TL;DR Boss/Company likes me, gave me 1.5K bonus today, also giving me a raise (supposedly $2k/year but isn't sure).

QUESTION: How can I negotiate for a little bit of higher pay raise ? Should I stay on hourly or go to salary ?

[tarquin]

You can always get an offer from an outside company to see what your market value is. It may backfire in a few different ways, though. Have your house in order before going this route.

[Cobra]

I mentioned this in my ROK article (link below).

My take is that yes you need to figure out your value first. BUT, you need to get out and go interview for a bunch of positions. Go all the way to the offer if you can and see what that salary number is. That's your value - the ability to get a job and also that number.

I mean yes, you may like your current job but be more willing to get out of your COMFORT ZONE and be ready to leave. Question why you're staying. Most guys I talk to, it's comfort and stability that keeps them there. Not drive or risk.

Let your boss know that you "really like working here but have to think about your future goals blah blah.." Then watch how the forces of the labor market align themselves in your favor without you asking for a raise.

This is just one way but one I prefer in my industry. I don't see why you can't apply it in others.