This pay rise thing has a basic component you need to be aware of from the start: there isn’t a specific point you have to reach before you ask for a rise. You can ask now if think you’re being undervalued at the moment. Or you can spend a couple of months increasing your value and then ask for more than you would right now. Or double your value over the next year or two and then ask. Where does it stop? Should you wait until you’re worth a hundred times more and then, a month before you finally retire, ask for the mother of all salary increases?
There is no right or wrong answer to this question. All I can tell you is that if you increase your value by 0.1 per cent each week and ask for a 0.1 per cent rise on a weekly basis, I don’t think it will be long before your boss starts getting fed up with you. But if you ask only once every ten years – with a steady increase in value throughout that time – you’ll be missing out. And you’ll be asking for a massive percentage rise, which may be more than your boss’s budget will allow.
As a very broad rule of thumb, aim to get a rise – or promotion or significant perk – every year, maybe linked to your annual salary review (we’ll look at the whole question of timing in detail later on). But to do this, you’re going to have to be able to demonstrate a substantial increase in your value every year with new, useful skills and new responsibilities. Being realistic, the more staid organizations, where pay rises are rare and money may be tight, are unlikely to reward you this often (although you can still lobby for a better annual bonus or other forms of recognition). But a forward-thinking, successful company which regularly gives pay rises to worthy employees should be happy to recognize a significant increase in your value on a yearly basis.
All of this makes a difference to which skills you need to develop. If you want to show a significant rise in your value over a year, you can focus your efforts on long-term learning. If you want to boost your worth in the next few months, you might be better off brushing up on three or four skills you can learn more quickly. In deciding which skills to start work on first, you need to balance four factors:
- Which skills will be the most valuable to the organization? There’s not much value in brushing up your school French if almost all the company’s overseas contacts speak Spanish.
- How good are you already? If you’re already very good at giving presentations, becoming brilliant isn’t going to be worth that much more to your boss – although it may be quick and easy for you to do. Better maybe to focus on improving your atrocious writing skills, or learning to operate useful software you aren’t at all familiar with.
- Which skills can you master most easily? You might choose to work on several areas at once. But you don’t want to have to learn two new languages, get your head round budgeting and start training for an MBA all at the same time. You’ve still got your regular job to do after all. You can manage several easy skills simultaneously, but perhaps only one difficult one at a time.
How long will each one take to master? Again, you might need only a week to learn the new software, whereas it could take two years to get a professional qualification.
You may be lucky enough to have come up with a relatively short list of valuable skills that will take only a few months to perfect. There again, you may not. Maybe there’s several years’ work there. So where to start? It depends very much on how much value you want to add and how fast. In theory, your best bet is to add to your portfolio the skills that are of most worth to your organization. But if acquiring these is a long way off, maybe you should balance them with a couple of useful and quicker skills – writing press releases, software training or whatever – so you can demonstrate an increase in your value quite soon.
Your priority list might also be influenced by your current position. If you think you already deserve a salary increase, you can ask for it now. That way, you’ve got a good year in which to train yourself up to be worth the next rise you ask for. If, on the other hand, you reckon your present salary is about fair but you want to be worth a rise as soon as possible, you probably want to add a good number of new skills you can learn fast, as well as making sure that at least one or two have really substantial value.