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When it comes to getting a meaningful raise, it’s up to you. You’ll need to take charge and ask your boss. Success will require preparation, timing and a heavy dollop of self-confidence.
Not sure you're well placed to get one? Think about your situation. Have you been asked to take on another employee's responsibilities because your company downsized? Have you been laying down extra hours to help your department meet its objectives? Has your company profited from your top-of-the-charts performance? Yes to any of these? Then it may be time to ask for a raise.
You’ll need to channel your inner salesperson. “Like it or not, we are all in sales,” Daniel Pink, best-selling author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others, told me when I interviewed him for my book Love Your Job: The New Rules for Career Happiness. “It’s not about going door-to-door selling products, but about moving people, convincing them to go along with your idea.”
You can succeed, because your workplace's payroll accounts may have money set aside for people like you. U.S. salary increase budgets are expected to grow by 3.2 percent in 2018, up from a 3.1 percent increase in 2017, according to Planning Global Compensation Budgets for 2018, a report by the compensation analysis firm ERI Economic Research Institute. Its findings are based on data from more than 20,000 companies and government statistics.
There are a lot of misconceptions out there about how to proceed. So here are seven salary negotiation myths that you’ll need to set aside if you’re going to land a raise.
Myth 1: You're not in the driver's seat. Not so. You have more power than you believe. Employers are worried about losing their best workers. Few younger workers can fill slots that need the kind of experience you have as a more seasoned employee. Millennials switch jobs more frequently than boomers, so employers really do have a motivation to keep you happy.