Career Resources

Career Resources

Are Your Salary Expectations Realistic?

Posted July 8, 2013 & filed under Uncategorized

Are Your Salary Expectations Realistic?

If you work hard & have an impressive string of accomplishments under your belt, you reasonably should be paid your worth yet a recent study suggests American workers are paid less than their expectations. Of the 1,501 adults surveyed by the American Psychological Association, over 50 percent reported back that they were inadequately paid. Salaries are without question a major factor when searching for a new source of employment but before you dismiss a position based on the salary, you might want to ask yourself: are your salary expectations realistic?

Find your worth

We all can speculate about our own monetary worth but you shouldn’t accept those speculations as binding provisos without a little bit of research first. Websites like Salary Wizard can help you generate a reliable ballpark for your earnings with information about your position, industry, and geographic location. After just a few clicks, you can lockdown a better idea of things like maximum, minimum, and median salaries.

For a few dollars, you can narrow down your salary range even further by incorporating your education, experience, and past performance into the equation. That way, you can determine which side of the bell curve your salary will be on and eliminate any unintentional over-inflations of your actual salary worth.

Consider other factors

Blind emphasis on salary alone can put a kibosh on your career movement. Remember, there are other prizes to be won that can more than make up for a salary under your expectations. Benefits like healthcare, 401k matching, stock options, paid time off, and others can have an unspoken monetary value that can close the gap between the salary offered and your original salary expectations.

Culture, though a bit more abstract, is another thing to consider. Before you eliminate a job below salary range, give the company culture a second look. Would you rather take a job that meets your salary expectations but is agonizing on a daily basis or take a job slightly under your expectations that you can’t live without? Your rapid burnout on the job isn’t worth a few thousand dollars more annually.

Call on help

If you’re still having trouble amending your salary expectations to the market, it might be time to call on a recruiter. A realistic salary can become clear through just a few quick conversations with these professionals. Since technical recruiters are constantly exposed to new job openings, they know what is an equitable offer based on your skills, education, & experience and can help you make the connections with companies willing to pay your actual worth.

By James Walsh

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