This is a topic dear to many if not everybody working in any industry today. How to get a hike or how do I get a higher pay?
Indeed. How can we ask or get a pay raise? It is a norm in the software industry to get a hike once a year as you continue to grow and deliver as expected for your company. You can expect a higher raise by delivering more value or exceeding expectations of your company as well.
All this is well and fine and everybody knows this. What else can you do to increase your pay?
Think about this for a minute. Why should you be paid more? Because you work hard(er) or because you are smart(er) or any other reason?
The reason to pay you more for any company is due to the value you bring in to the company at that point in time and also considering your future potential.
Knowing this, can we conclude -
Salary = Value + Future Potential
Now, it becomes surprisingly easy. How can you increase your salary? Either you increase the value you bring in and/or increase your future potential. Simple mathematics right?
Let us now break it down into what that can mean.
Increasing your value means, you can volunteer to take on more challenging tasks, be more accountable to your company, manage stakeholders and communication with them, make yourself more visible by offering help to other teams or team members, suggesting features or working on improving the performance of a system or fixing a broken process or more.
How about increasing your future potential? Again think about it. What skills can you learn which can be beneficial to you and your company or even in the industry? You can perhaps invest some time to up-skill your communication skills, learn a new course on an upcoming technology or a new technology which can be useful for the work you do. You can also spend time to certify yourself in the new cloud technologies or platforms or frontend frameworks to ensure you are right in the bleeding edge of technology. When you learn something new don't just do a course and post that certificate on LinkedIn! Go a step beyond and try a simple real world project with that technology and post it on your personal Github or suggest this technology (if it makes sense) to the new project being kicked off in your team and offer to help the team learn this.
All these techniques not only help increasing your salary, but, they help up-skill you as a person and you start becoming more valuable to the team, organisation and your company. That will automatically increase your salary and your standing in the industry itself making you into a top earner in time. What else do you think you can try to command a higher pay?
Have more questions on career and pay? Connect with Pradeep Kaushik for a chat here - https://www.pradeepkaushik.com/connect
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