If you’re serious about getting this rise, you must make an honest and fair assessment of your value in the five key areas we’ve just highlighted. I suggest you grade yourself in each area out of ten. There’s not a lot you can do about the first two, but you still need to know where you stand. For the other three, give yourself marks out of ten and then list your key strengths (to point out to your boss when the time comes) and your chief weaknesses.

Now, look. You’re going to have to be honest here and I know that isn’t always easy. But your boss isn’t going to have any trouble listing your weaknesses, so you’d better manage it too.

What are you worth? You need to know before you got a pay raise!

You don’t have to tell anyone else but yourself, after all. If you want to maximize your value – you’ve got to minimize your weaknesses. And you can’t do that if you don’t know what they are.

If your assessment indicates that you are already worth way more than you’re being paid, you may want to go ahead and ask for a rise right now. But if you want the best possible pay rise (or other recognition of your value), you’d do better to improve on your direct value, performance and team value as much as possible before you ask. The more you’re worth, after all, the more you’re likely to get.

Find your weaknesses

If you’re serious about identifying your weaknesses (and you’ll -have to be if you want a decent rise), try asking other people. Your best friends in the organization – or colleagues from past jobs – may be prepared to tell you. Or they might anonymously tell someone else acting on your behalf. Or agree to get together with others and write you an ‘anonymous’ collective note. (If no one dares point out any weaknesses to you even when you ask, and even if you get them drunk first, that’s probably a big clue to your first weakness.)

       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.