it’s your Friday good news

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
It’s your Friday good news!
1.  “My note goes out to all the women who have written in about gathering their courage to ask for a raise because their stories gave me the courage to ask for a raise!
My organization approached me about job training for advanced work, along with bumping me up the pay range. At the end of our meeting I said thank you, this sounds good, but I want to review the proposed pay increase. I went back to my desk and pulled up the pay ranges, and it was a nice bump, but did not equal the value I felt I provide my organization. I put in a lot of extra effort during Covid, including transitioning my organization to almost fully digital form processing, covered two vacant positions for most of 2022, and trained both new employees on a significant portion of their job duties. I considered my options, wrote up a summary of why I deserved more money, and asked for two steps higher, which changed it from a $6,000/year raise to a $10,000/year raise. A work friend proofread it, I slept on it overnight, and I sent it to my supervisors.
And they agreed! In the past I would’ve been happy to just accept what was offered, but having read so many examples of women asking to be compensated for the work they do gave me the gumption to ask the same for myself. Thank you!”
2.   “I’m in an extremely competitive yet notoriously poorly compensated field (I’m leaving it out for the sake of anonymity, but readers are welcome to guess!), and for years I had a job where I loved the team and the work itself, but was paid $45,000 in a high cost-of-living city and never received a raise, not even a COLA, despite having asked multiple times and being widely considered one of the company’s top performers.
I passively job searched but never put any real urgency into it.
My workload got much higher during Covid. I rose to the challenge and my output increased further, which grew the productivity gap between me and the rest of my team. I pointed all of this out to my boss, asked for a raise again, and I was told I was ‘top of the list’ whenever there would be money for it. I told my boss to tell his boss that I was job searching as a last-ditch effort to get a raise—I knew they valued me enough not to fire me. The message I received back was, ‘Good for you. You deserve better than this place can give you.’
I got a lot of interviews but wasn’t able to land anything—again, extremely competitive field, and my experience was in the awkward space between entry-level and mid-level, and I didn’t want to make a lateral move. Well, while on vacation in the middle of my job hunt, I got a call from a direct competitor with a job offer they thought I would be the perfect candidate for. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted—while my passion is in, let’s say, teapot painting, they were offering a position as manager of teapot assembling—but it would be a move up, and the pay was significantly better. (They offered $60k, I negotiated up to $65k.) So I took it and let my employer know. They started a frenzied attempt to counteroffer—they were envisioning a “senior teapot painter” role and matching the salary, but they had to get it approved by corporate. Alison, I was livid. It made my decision so much harder, since I did love the team, and senior teapot painter was my dream job! But I remembered your advice that a company that needs to counteroffer to treat its employees well is probably not worth staying in, so I told them not to bother checking with corporate and moved onto the new job.
New job was fine—the workload was way lower and I was making more money, which was great, but I still didn’t love the work itself. I slowly tried to take on more responsibility for things I enjoyed more, which came with stipends that collectively added about $6,500 to my annual salary. And after six months (!) I successfully asked to raise my base to $70k.
Well, about a year into my job, my boss told me the company was thinking about creating a teapot painting manager position, but that it would be hard to hire for. I told them I’d like to throw my hat in the ring, and they were thrilled! I got promoted without them conducting an open search, and I got yet another raise, with another stipend for a specific responsibility I was taking on. My annual pay now is close to $90k.
I’m doing work I love, getting paid nearly double what I was two years ago, and for a company that recognizes talent and compensates accordingly. I’m so SO grateful I took the advice not to accept a counteroffer. While I would have loved the work, I never would have gotten more money beyond the $65k match, and the raises I’ve received in my current company have literally been life-changing.
This is a long one, but I hope it can serve as inspiration for some of your readers: It’s OK for progress to be incremental. Sometimes it takes a few stepping stones to get to where you really want to be.”
3.  “I spent six years at Old Company. For the first three of those years, I got no pay raises, partly due to having a boss who didn’t want to be a manager and wouldn’t make a case to the business for our team. Even though the whole company was building its strategy around our work, HR thought our pay scale should be the same as other divisions of the business.
I kept seeing job postings at higher rates of pay than mine. A lot of the jobs sounded imperfect, but I put some applications in, got some interviews, and eventually jumped for a slightly different specialty which will broaden my expertise and a 40% pay bump.
The best part? Apparently my departure was the last straw, and now all the roles on my old team have their own pay bands — a fair bit higher than they were.”
4.  “After being at Old Job for 3.5 years, I knew it was time to move on. I loved my colleagues and the actual work I was doing, but there was no room for growth, HR was awful, and I wasn’t confident the company was going to exist in 10 years. An oversaturated field (libraries/museums/archives), geographic limitations, and the need to make X salary to survive in my East Coast metro area meant I could only apply for certain positions.
A year of searching got me a few interviews at places that would have been a bad fit, so I was resigned to staying at Old Job for at least another year before trying again. But then Dream Job came up and I couldn’t not apply. I used all your tools to feel confident in the interviews, show the hiring team that I knew what I was talking about, and get the offer! I also used your tips to negotiate for time off for my wedding a month after my start date. After I started, my boss said that I was the most impressive candidate they interviewed and I credit a lot of that to AAM’s advice.
I’ve been at New Job now for 9 months and of course it isn’t perfect, but it is lightyears better than Old Job. I don’t feel like I have to work as efficiently as possible every minute of every day to make sure my work outlives the company; I don’t have to deal with company members with absolutely no boundaries; I don’t have an HR department who forgets my department exists.
I emailed you twice during the whole year-long search  (asking about  vacation time when job searching  and then  freaking out when my offer letter at Dream Job was revised ) and so appreciated your grace when answering. Thank you, thank you for all the advice on the blog!”
5.  “I’ve been an avid reader of your blog for over five years and I am happy to say I have a success story to share!
After following your site for tips on cover letters, resumes, interviews, and job offers, I am happy to say I have accepted a new position making 96.0370% (yes, I did the math) more than I did, I’m on a tenure track, and I get half days on Friday! Now into the wild world of academic libraries!”
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