To get ready to land that new job or position, ideally you “do your homework.” This includes updating and fine-tuning your resumé, learning about the companies you’ll target and interview with, and discovering how to best present yourself in an interview. It’s also searching to find a position’s salary range before you apply for the job, and the Internet makes this task easier than ever.

You may think you’ve got everything covered, but there’s a part of this process that many people overlook, and that is How to Negotiate Your Salary!

Learning how to negotiate your salary is a very important component of job hunting, but people often make mistakes here. Just as for most subjects, this too is a “knowledge is power” issue. Take the time to become better educated on salary negotiation, and it will pay off for you – literally!

First you may have to change your thinking and understanding of “income” and value. To illustrate this, consider the salaries of actors or film stars. When they negotiate salary, they address the value they bring to the company or project. By reputation alone they will help fill theater seats and spur DVD sales. You see how this idea of value delivered goes far beyond simply covering living expenses! You must think of your own talents and job performance in the same way. Determine your strengths and be able to articulate what your skills and performance can bring to the company.

Some job hunters feel they are not allowed to discuss salary at all, or are not assertive enough when they do. However, others go too far the other way. If a person is too demanding about salary needs, they may inadvertently talk themselves out of a job.

• Note: do not post your salary information. Do not include it in your communications, including e-mail. Past salary history does not belong on your resumé.

Always remember: don’t talk salary unless you’ve got the job! Unless you’ve been offered the position, you are still an applicant. You’ll want to be seen as a team member, and that’s what you’ll be if you’ve received an offer and say “Yes!” You’ll enjoy much more clout this way.

Should an interviewer or HR person ask what salary you want before you’ve been offered a job, respond honestly that you’ll have to know more about the position before you can answer that question. If answering a so-called “blind want ad” that asks applicants to provide a salary history, simply state that your salary is “open.”

As you prepare for your interview and salary negotiations, practice stating the salary and privileges that you believe you merit, and importantly, the reasons why. You’ll use this tactic in negotiations.

Once in negotiations, it may be best to never overstate your past salary history. Despite all of our privacy laws, an exaggeration may be discovered. If you do inflate these real figures and are caught, you could lose your job.

If you’re asked to state a minimum annual starting salary, give an range slightly higher than what the job should pay according to your research. For instance, if a position runs between $52–58K per year, state that your minimum range is between $54–60K. The strategy is to spur offers towards the higher end.

If the top of the salary range is too low but you still want the job, make sure that you initially negotiate for a salary review in the near future, say at 3–6 months from hiring.

Once you have the position, salary is really a “don’t’ ask, don’t tell” issue:

• Don’t announce or discuss what you make with co-workers.
• Don’t talk about any fringe benefits or additional goodies you receive.
• If a co-worker brags about their salary, let them. Whether they make more than you or not, don’t enlighten them with the truth.



Even if you’ve never done it before, you can learn to negotiate salary! If you’d like additional help or coaching in salary negotiation or other career-related issues, contact me.

The Career Chase: Taking Creative Control in a Chaotic Age, by Helen Harkness and Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute, by Jack Chapman, other excellent sources for negotiating strategies.

Tags:
• career
• career career issues
• coaching
• helen harkness
• how to make $1000 a minute
• interview
• interviewer
• jack chapman
• job
• job hunters
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When I was rapidly barreling down the academic highway to reach the Ph.D. destination, I spent one entire semester studying Mark Twain. He was, and still is considered “the first” and most important American writer. And indeed, he’s revered throughout the world! As a sixth grader in the West Virginia mountains, I was totally connected to his stories. I was fascinated that he entered the world with Halley’s Comet and also died with it, slightly over 100 years ago!

I connect with Twain’s quotes, and I begin most speeches I present with his, “You can’t no more teach what you don’t know than come back from where you ain’t been!”

Particularly appropriate for me at this point in my life is, “Aging is an issue of mind over matter: If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter!”

Here are additional Twain quotes that connect with me:

“The most successful people are those who do all year long what they would otherwise do on their summer vacation.””

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you can become great.”

"Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.”

"Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time”

"Two things seemed pretty apparent to me: One was that in order to be a Mississippi River pilot, a man had to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know…and the other was that he must learn it all over again a different way every 24 hours.”(This fits countless professions today!)

I also admire Twain for another reason. After a highly successful literary career followed by the death of his wife and his editor, he unfortunately made bad investments and lost his money and along with that of several friends! But he didn’t give up – late in life he picked up a new career and made became a highly successful speaker and entertainer. Thanks to his efforts, he recovered all the money he had lost.

Researching and studying future trends has been a master key for my success in the workplace! Of course, Toffler’s prediction of 3–5 career changes seemed, on the surface, to be both absurd and ridiculous in the early 70’s, and seemed to most to be just as odd years later when I started Career Design in the late 70’s.

Becoming a futurist and attending the annual World Future Society conferences for the last 20-plus years has stimulated my foresight and intuitional abilities. This year the WFS will be meeting in Boston in July, and at each conference I coordinate the career counseling sessions for the attendees. This helps me spot coming career problems. My colleagues – career counselors from all over the US and abroad – volunteer their time to help the attendees gain focus and meaning.

The Futurist, a monthly publication of the World Future Society, is packed with insights into the future. From the most recent issue, “The Top 10 Forecasts for 2010 and Beyond,” are:

1. Book publishers may need to hire movie directors. Books are finally going multimedia and digital, and publishers are offering more content online for free. Textbooks will bring together a wide variety of talents to create a multimedia “book.” The shift from print to multimedia means that the writers of the future will work with Web designers, software developers and other professionals to create products. The next step for publishers will be involving the readers in the publishing process, using them to set prices and give input on what to publish. —Patrick Tucker (“The 21st-Century Writer,” July-Aug 2008, p. 25).
2. Retirees in the United States will increasingly return to the workforce. One-third of Americans who retire are back on the job two years later, and growing numbers of retirees are choosing to start their own businesses. About one in five people, and 40% of seniors, say they plan to continue working until they die, and nearly two-thirds of Americans say they doubt that retirement is possible for the middle class. —Marvin J. Cetron and Owen Davies (“Trends Shaping Tomorrow’s World, Part Two,” May–June 2008, p. 43).
3. The United States is headed for a “demographic singularity.” Management professor Nat Irvin II defines demographic singularity as a pace of change so fast that the American identity as we know it will be irreversibly altered. He puts the year for the singularity at 2015, when minorities will make up 40% of the U.S. population. —Nat Irving II (quoted in “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally, Living Personally,” Nov-Dec 2007, p. 57).
4. Empowering girls through education will improve future communities. Girls who have access to adequate secondary education are much more likely to practice family planning, according to a new report. The report also finds that education increases girls’ civic participation and makes them less likely to experience sexual harassment, to contract HIV/AIDS, or to fall victim to sexual or labor trafficking. —World Trends & Forecasts (Jan-Feb 2008, p. 8).
5. Americans may turn away from antidepressants. According to anthropologist Helen Fisher, Americans are taking 100 million prescriptions for antidepressants. “We know these drugs kill the sex drive. I maintain that these drugs also kill your ability to love and your ability to stay in love,” she says. As possible side-effects become more apparent, fewer people may elect to take antidepressant drugs like Prozac and Paxil. —Helen Fisher (quoted in “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally, Living Personally,” Nov–Dec 2007, p. 2).
6. You’ll have more friends you’ll never meet, and cyberfriends may outnumber real-life friends. The generation of young people now aged 12–24 years may have more friends whom they will have never met in person. Unlike older cohorts, Gen Y-ers (aka the Millennial Generation) are comfortable with befriending strangers virtually via social networking sites and other cyber options that connect people based on their interests rather than physical location. —Andy Hines (“Global Trends in Culture, Infrastructure, and Values,” Sept–Oct 2008, p. 20).
7. Employment in the United States will continue to rise. Total employment in the United States will increase by 15.6 million jobs between 2006 and 2016. However, this rate is slightly slower than that of the previous decade. “In-person” jobs such as health-care and those for other services workers will grow, while jobs that can be outsourced likely will be. Experts recommend that young people educate themselves now for more-global career opportunities in the future. —World Trends & Forecasts (May–June 2008, p. 6).

In dealing with unrelenting change for myself and my career clients, I remember that I am a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks. “You can no more teach what you don’t know than come back from where you ain’t been” according to Mark Twain.

I may have learned more from this reality education than the academic Ph.D. Perhaps the combination set me up to be extremely committed and successful in plowing through the fear, chaos and uncertainty of the “dark night of the soul” and the pain which results from unexpected change!