Salary Story: I Learned Friends Aren’t A Good Enough Reason To Stay At A 60k Job
In our series Salary Stories, women with long-term career experience open up about the most intimate details of their jobs: compensation. It’s an honest look at how real people navigate the complicated world of negotiating, raises, promotions and job loss, with the hope it will give young women more insight into how to advocate for themselves — and maybe take a few risks along the way.
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Age: 29 Location: London Current industry and job title: Workplace manager, tech Current salary: £70,000 Number of years employed since school or university: 11
Starting salary: £18,000 Biggest salary jump: £45,000 to £70,000 in 2022. Biggest salary drop: £60,000 to £28,000 in 2018. I moved from investment banking to the charity sector.
Biggest negotiation regret: I regret just taking the salary I was offered at my previous role and not negotiating it up.
The role was a £13,000 salary increase and I had told the recruiter what I was on currently so I didn’t want to come across as greedy.
I was moving from the charity sector to tech and I later found out that team members were on much higher salaries than me.
When I moved jobs a year later I was offered a £20,000 salary increase to join another tech firm. Even though I was so happy with this I still made sure to negotiate, and got it up to £25,000.
Best salary advice: If you are unhappy and not thriving in a role then make a change!
There are so many roles out there that will appreciate you, challenge you, compensate you properly.
I spent too long in jobs where I wasn’t being challenged and became deflated and even a bit lazy. I wasn’t pushing myself. I didn’t have much joy in my work but I stayed as I was surrounded by people I liked spending time with.
When you move and find that spark and joy for work again, you always think: Wow! Why didn’t I do this sooner?
Having friends isn’t a good enough reason to stay at a company. You can meet up with those friends outside of work. Plus you will make new friends at your new role.
I was 18 when I got this job. Most of my friends went to university and my parents were very clear that if I wasn’t planning to go to uni then I had to get a job fast. When I was looking for this job I was in the same mindset as I had for the part-time jobs I had done throughout school. I didn’t think of it as my first job in my career. I just wanted a job to get money to do things I wanted to do. I found the job on Gumtree, had one interview and started the next day. It paid £18,000 a year. It wasn’t really until I was a bit older and my friends were finishing up at university and started talking about what they wanted to do that I realised I had no idea what I wanted to do as a career either.I had been at the company for 10 months and asked my boss for a pay review.
Ahead of this meeting I had made notes of what I had achieved since my time at the company and why I felt I deserved a pay rise. He gave me a £4,000 pay rise to £22,000.
I decided to change companies as there weren’t many progression opportunities in my first role. I decided I wanted to work for a big company with more opportunities for me to grow. So I joined an investment bank as an administrator. I was promoted to an analyst after taking on more responsibility during the year. I put myself forward for lots of things outside my role, started leading meetings and completed courses paid for by work. This meant a pay rise to £45,000.My boss went on maternity leave and during the year I stepped up a lot to help the team. I led projects and started managing two junior members of the team. Three months into my boss’ maternity cover I was promoted, which paid £60,000.In 2018 I decided to move from investment banking to the charity sector. During the last year of my time as a senior operational analyst I became incredibly stressed and my mental health was really struggling. I was working long hours, unable to spend time with friends and had crippling anxiety. I took three months’ sick leave and then decided I needed to change careers.
I worked with a career coach to find out how I could utilise my skills for good and managed to get a job in the charity sector as an operations associate, helping out with the day-to-day running of the business. I was really nervous about taking such a huge pay cut to £26,000 but I had savings and decided I needed to put my mental health first.
After about six months in the company I was promoted to operations manager on £30,000. I think my boss had realised I had joined the company at too junior a level and I was capable of taking on a lot more responsibility. In 2019, about a year after my promotion, I was given a pay rise to £32,000. By this time I was leading the operations of the company and was quite disappointed with this pay rise. I started to feel like I would never earn good money again and started to think about my next role but then COVID happened. The company was barely afloat and I was furloughed.In 2021 my furlough ended and the company said they were unable to give any pay increases as they were struggling. I decided to look for another role. I knew I didn’t want to go back to investment banking as I had been under incredible stress but started to think that I could not survive on my salary in the charity sector.
I decided to look for roles in tech. I really enjoyed the workplace experience aspect of my role so thought about going down the workplace manager route where I could use my knowledge of operations and employee experience. I took the job at £45,000 and was happy with this as it was a £13,000 jump. I later regretted not pushing for more when I spoke to my team members from Paris and Germany and found out they were earning more than me.
The HR director from my company left and joined another tech firm. He approached me and asked me to come and interview with his new company. I spoke to a few different people at the company and it sounded like a great opportunity so I decided to take the plunge. I’m very glad I did! I’m now on £70,000.
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