Deciding what salary range to request from your prospective employer during an interview process or at the end of a performance review or promotion can be quite tasking. There are so many general and personal reasons for this. For many candidates and employees, salaries are considered the ‘holy grail’ and they don’t want to be seen as cheap or desperate by asking for less or come off as being greedy by asking for too much.
Some other professionals don’t just know how or what to request. Let us take a look at certain factors you must consider before you decide to give your employer or HR manager a specific salary range.
Geographical Location
Your geographical location is quite important to how much you should earn as you factor in your cost of living as well as the availability of talent. Most professionals consider the distance of their homes to the workplace as well as the cost of their commute to work and back home in giving a salary range. This distance, while it may also be a factor, does not entirely capture geography as a deciding factor.
Living in one geographical location might make your salary high for a particular role while you might not be able to earn the same thing for the same role in another location. This explains why an IT/Software professional in the Banking & Finance sector in Lagos would earn more than one with the same experience and same industry in Abuja.
Your Experience and Skills
Your experience, skills and training should also be a determining factor in deciding your salary range. Generally, being on the job longer and evolving with the right set of skills required for the job and industry can determine your salary. While experience, according to the number of years is a deciding factor, another professional who has the same experience, more skills, training and accomplishments can be on a higher range than you.
Personal Accomplishments
The number of years, training and skills gained are important but another thing that is also important in deciding your salary range is your personal accomplishments in the course of your career. We should add here that these accomplishments have to be relevant to the job.
How many projects did you initiate and complete? By what percentage did you increase the organisation’s revenue via meeting and surpassing sales targets? How many customer service issues did you resolve that lead to earning loyalty? How many marketing ideas that you implemented lead to new leads for your organisation? Ask yourself such questions and you should be able to come up with a list of accomplishments.
Your Industry Can Determine the Salary Range
Did you know that an engineer in Nigeria working in the NGO sector averagely earns higher those working for the construction sector in Nigeria? As surprising as it is, so many factors come into play. A lot of NGOs are international organisations, which sometimes makes their pay higher than what their peers earn in the construction sector.
This also means as a professional, if you request a range that is for the wrong sector, you may be shooting yourself in the foot.
Availability of Talent and Title
The availability of talent and skills are in your location would determine how good or not your salary range should be. The fact that some talents and skills are not readily available in a certain location or industry can ensure the salary range of those jobs are high.
Also, a managerial level Sales Analyst and Intern Sales Analyst cannot have the same salary range. This would be unrealistic for any employer.
Job Responsibility
Two creative designers with the same experience but working on a marketing team yet handling a different number of deliverable can have their salary range differ. This is generally as a direct result of the difference in their workload. If you are also at the same level but take on much more responsibility, it is only natural that your salary range differs.
Salary Insights Tool
We live in a time where data is more important than any intelligent human guess that you can make. This is why over the years, Jobberman invested in developing Nigeria’s first Salary Tool that gives you the capacity to accurately produce industry salary estimates for employers and employees.
The salary insights tool is powered by data from over 50,000 employers and 2 million + professionals across different sectors and industry in Nigeria. Using it would ensure a more industry standard salary range than a presumptive guess.
