Salary Story: I Told My Manager I Wanted To Work In A Different Department
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: 27 Location: Essex Current industry and job title: Fashion e-commerce, junior UX researcher Current salary: £37,000 Number of years employed since school or university: 10
Starting salary: £16,000 in 2014 Biggest salary jump: £31,000 to £37,000 in 2022 Biggest salary drop: N/A
Biggest negotiation regret: It never occurred to me to negotiate until I started to talk with my fellow coworkers about salaries. I remember starting somewhere and noticing that my coworkers were earning at least £5,000 more than me, even though we did the same job and had the same title. Not only did I not think of negotiating my salary, but benefits never occurred to me either until I started to work at my current company, which offers great benefits compared to other places I worked for. I wish I wasn’t so afraid to just ask; no harm in asking and I may have been able to get a little bit more.
Best salary advice: I have managed to raise my salary by moving roles, at times where I also didn’t feel I was progressing and wasn’t liking my job so much. I think it’s good to recognise when you may be underpaid or undervalued. Going forward I am going to ask for more. As a POC I do find it harder as I have a mindset of automatically assuming I can’t get more compared to my peers. However, I deserve it and shouldn’t be made to feel like I need to settle and suffer.
This was my first full time role in retail. I had mainly taken this role because I needed to start earning after university and pay rent. I had applied to so many roles after university but wasn’t having much luck. I felt like I needed to do an internship but I couldn’t afford not to earn. I didn’t negotiate this salary, as I didn’t think about it, plus is was retail and I felt like it wasn’t an industry where I could ask. This was another retail job for a luxury brand, and again I didn’t negotiate. Once I heard they gave commission, I assumed I could get a lot of money and didn’t think I needed to negotiate the base.
I decided to apply to non-retail jobs again, as I didn’t want to work in retail forever. I also didn’t want to work on weekends and wanted a nine-to-five job. Logistics wasn’t the route I wanted to take, but I didn’t know much about it so I took this role and ended up really enjoying it. I didn’t negotiate as I just wanted to move out of retail, plus at the time I felt the like the small jump was nice. I was still doing a short course in HR part time. I applied for an HR role at the same company. When I started back in 2017, I had mentioned that I would be interested in an HR role, and they kept it in mind. A year later when the opportunity came up internally, I was approached by the team. At the time I thought it would be a permanent role, but it was a secondment. I didn’t negotiate for this reason and looked at it as experience. I also didn’t have experience in this area so didn’t feel like I would be offered much.It was time to move somewhere new. The interview process was quite long and there were quite a lot of stages. I ended up receiving an offer after two months of interviews, and I was so excited as this salary was a big step for me. I do feel that, on reflection, I could have asked for more, and even my partner said I should. But I was pretty content and felt scared to ask in case they took back the offer. I really wanted this job so I just accepted, plus the benefits were great. I questioned my salary for the first time after I found out that my coworkers who had the same job title were on a higher salary than me. I was a bit disheartened and didn’t understand the reason why I was the only one on less. I ended up questioning this in my year-end review and it was changed to match my peers. While on maternity leave, I had a review (this was the norm in my company), which would have been based on my performance before my leave. I was given a £1,000 raise, but I didn’t feel this was fair. I felt so stuck, undervalued and not taken seriously.
Before I went on maternity leave, I had actually started to think about where I would like to go in my career and whether HR was the right career for me. I had expressed this to my manager who was understanding of my decision and they supported me. I started doing a short course to get a better understanding and some skills in the area of UX research, as this appealed to me. So I kept this all in mind when I had this small raise.
My role was being made redundant. Another role was offered in the team, but my manager knew I wanted to pursue a career in UX so they gave me time to think about my decisions. A week later I decided to check the internal job board for the company and spotted a junior UX role, which I immediately applied to.
I had planned to negotiate as I believe I had transferrable skills, but in the end I didn’t as I felt like this salary was a good starting point in my career. I am excited to see where this role takes me in UX and definitely I’ll end up earning more.
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