It’s time to ask for a pay rise but the thought of actually doing it is an uncomfortable one but it really doesn’t have to be.
There’s a school of thought that women just don’t ask for pay rises, and that this partly explains a gender pay gap.
But Australian-based research conducted in 2014 and recently published in the Harvard Business Review found the complete opposite.
The study found that women ask for pay rises just as much as men do, but they just don’t get them to the same extent.
With this in mind, we want to help you increase your chances of securing a pay rise by considering 3 steps.
Plan Ahead…1-3 Years Ahead
To ensure that you are adding value to a company, it’s important to make sure that your short-term and long-term aspirations align with the goals of management.
Let’s say you are currently an associate and want to become a manager in a year or two. You want to voice your aspirations for advancement as soon as possible.
Then, work on your career roadmap with your manager. Define a few milestones (becoming a manager + growing your team to provide analytics across x,y,z departments, for instance) and agree on what skills or deliverables you will need to attain and deliver to achieve each milestone.
So when the time comes, there is little room left for debate regarding your qualification to move up.
Invest in Professional Development and Leverage it
If you want to get paid more and move up in your career, it’s going to become more competitive.
You need to demonstrate to your employer that you’re continuously learning and obtaining knowledge and skills that will make you the best possible candidate for any role you are gunning for.
You may not necessarily need to go back to studies for an MBA degree. You can easily take on targeted courses online or on campus to demonstrably improve your knowledge.
The word demonstrably is key here. We’re not talking about a bootcamp or a one-day seminar here but more of a dedicated program where you get a certificate from an accredited institution at the end so you can physically show your employer the result of your professional development.
Letting your employer know in advance that you will be broadening your horizon in this way should have an immediate impact on their view of your value.
Keep them updated on your progress and share your learnings. Remind them as often as possible that you are continuously improving resource with a lot of potential.
Be Visible. Be Prolific.
Promoting yourself at work is similar to promoting any brand in the marketplace; you want to be visible, known, and appreciated by many.
So volunteer to lead a charity or employee engagement event/initiative.
Consider joining clubs and groups with executive sponsors and mentoring newcomers or junior professionals. And make sure that your manager (and his/her boss and their influencers all know and appreciate your presence and contributions to the firm).
This way, people at your own firm will come to support you (brand recognition) and you can build yourself to be as close as one can get to being irreplaceable.
In addition, you may also want to reach out to people in departments and functions you don’t normally associate with and find opportunities to work with diverse functions.
The better you understand the big picture, the better you can build your career goals to make yourself a much more desirable talent. And that’s how you build your personal brand to expand your value proposition in the market!
This Financy article has been produced in partnership with Training.com.au.
