- Money and salaries and paychecks It's all very taboo isn't it to talk about how much we get paid? And that's exactly what I
want to do in this video because I don't think that money talk should be a thing that we avoid. The more we talk about how much we earn the more we can help each other
to be paid what we're worth. So right now I want to take you through my design career so
far and my history of raises and negotiations and talk
about the different changes that led to my different salary increases over the past eight years. (upbeat electronic music) A few disclaimers that I want to make before we get into this video fully, I am going to be sharing
real numbers in this video because why the heck not. But what's more important is the context surrounding those numbers so that's what I want
you to focus on okay. My career has been in different countries different currencies and
location has a huge impact on how much you're paid
for certain design jobs so just keep that in mind when I'm talking about
these different jobs. I'm gonna tell you where
they were in the world and that should help
you for context there. I'll be converting all my
salaries into US dollars though just so we've got a constant
going throughout this. Different areas and
disciplines within design can also be paid very differently so what I'm sharing with you here is my personal experience as
a web and graphic designer. I also want to note that the only reason I feel comfortable talking about this now is because the company
I currently work for has standardized salaries so I feel confident that
I'm being paid fairly but I haven't always felt that way. So please don't take any of these numbers that I'm sharing with you as a benchmark or as my advice on what you should ask for in certain stages of your career Cool? Alright With that out the way, let's get into it. My first ever full-time job as a designer was working as a graphic designer on the marketing team at a reseller of Mitsubishi Electric
products in New Zealand. I worked there part time
while I finished my studies and basically as soon as I finished my last university classes
they offered me a full-time job for 35,000 New Zealand dollars. I did not negotiate that salary at all which spoiler alert is
unfortunately a common theme throughout my career history. But honestly I was just thrilled to be earning a full-time
living doing design work. After I'd been there a few months they gave me about a 14% raise and I can't remember if
I had any other raises while I was at that company but the next big jump I had in my salary was when I left that job
to start my career in tech. So this first job in tech
was a marketing design role at an accounting software company based in Wellington
New Zealand called Zero The company had I think around 350 400 employees worldwide
when I started there. And I was making this transition from print to web and when they asked me my salary expectations I said that I wanted to make over $50,000 and what they offered me was 60,000. So well over what I offered I was obviously undervaluing myself and I appreciated that Zero
didn't take advantage of that. I took that offer again
without negotiating because it was a 50%
increase on the salary I was earning at Mitsubishi Electric and so I was stoked with that. I know now that I should've negotiated because one it can't hurt to try. Right? Might as well. And two when you get a raise at a company it's usually based on the percentage of the salary that you are on. So when you come in you're sort of setting this baseline for
what you're getting paid and your raises that
you get on top of that will be building on that initial salary. So the higher you can negotiate for that initial salary to be the more you'll get in
your raises essentially. But you live and you learn. So not negotiating when
you first start out can limit your potential earnings
at the company as a whole which is unfortunate so
learn from my mistake. Zero was also a company
though that offered bonuses both in the form of a catch bonus yearly where it was like a set amount and then you get a percentage of it based on how well the company did. So you might get like
80% of your cash bonus for that year for example. And they also had what they called a long-term bonus in the form of shares because Zero was a
publicly traded company. So I've got some Zero shares
for my time working there. I'm not gonna go too deeply
into benefits in this video but it's important to note that the overall package is
what you should look at when you're evaluating a role not just the pure number of salary. I've got a couple of
raises at my time at Zero through just performance reviews and as the company grew my 10 year there sort of became more and more valuable and I ended up being paid
73,000 New Zealand dollars by the time I left New
Zealand and moved to London. Now the cool thing about
this move to London was that Zero had an office there so I was able to transfer
within the company and not have to look for a
job in London which was cool. But my biggest mistake here was that I treated this move too much like Zero was doing me a favor and not enough like I
was filling a vacant role at the design position
in the office in London. They didn't have any
designer there anymore when I moved over to fill that. Zero didn't help with any
relocation costs for this move because they said it was
a self initiated thing so that's why they
weren't gonna pay for it. And yea basically just I have some regrets about how I handled that situation. It was all very complex, but yeah. I think there were some things
that I could've done better. Anyway I didn't know that living in London I was gonna have a higher cost of living and Zero knew this too and
so what they offered me for this transition for this move to do the same job essentially that I was doing in New
Zealand but based in London They offered me 42,000
pounds as my starting salary. So that was about a 15% increase from my salary for the
same role in New Zealand. Now I've done my research and found that the cost of living in London was about 27% higher than in New Zealand. And so that's what I was
hoping for in a raise and what I did speak
to my manager about but this is what we ended up on and I took it and I don't regret that
because it did allow me to move to London pretty seamlessly to turn up in a country on
the other side of the world with a job was pretty great. My next salary increase
came about six months later when I actually left that job at Zero to start working at a
London-based tech company Now in this role the mistake that I made in this process was
actually answering them when they asked me what
I was earning currently. This is something that
a potential employer is always gonna ask you in an interview. And I would advise you not to be the person who says a number first. When they ask you what you're earning or what you want to earn, it's always good idea to ask them for what the range is for this role and then you can give
your answer based on that. If you go in there and lay a number down on the table first then you are setting that benchmark and it's potential that the company could take advantage of you in doing that. Honestly what you are currently earning should have no impact
on what your value is in a role at a new company
it shouldn't play a part. So don't be the first one to say a number. Anyway I told them that my salary package I was earning currently
at Zero was 45,000 pounds and they said well you're probably actually getting paid pretty well for where you're at in your career and they ended up offering to match that. In a stroke of boldness though I decided I was gonna try and negotiate and I asked them for a
whole thousand pounds extra. I asked for 46,000 pounds and they agreed pretty much immediately
and that's when I knew that I obviously should've asked for way more than that in the negotiation. I know, I tried. This is what I hate about this whole salary negotiation process is that you end up being
paid a lot of the times based on your negotiation skills rather than your design
skills which I think is lame. But anyway this ended up being about a 9.5% increase on my base salary from my role at zero. But because Edited didn't offer any bonuses or all that sort of things as part of the salary package I was ending up being
paid around about the same which was a good salary to allow me to live comfortably in zone two in London. Sadly I did not get any sort of raise or even a performance
review that I remember in the whole 18 months I was there. I don't know the company wasn't great at career development I will say that. But so my next change in salary my next increase came when I changed roles to my current job that I
have now at ConvertKit. This is my first remote role and it's also a US-based company so theres a whole lot of
different factors in there. The company was about twenty something people I think when I started. Oh and for context Edited was maybe about 40-ish when I started just to give you some context for that
salary that they offered me. Anyway I was really excited with this new job offer to be working remote and to not be having to
commute every day in London because that was taking up a lot of time. But I did want to make
sure that I was being paid enough to sustain my lifestyle in London and to keep up with the
cost of living there. I ended up starting at ConvertKit on just a few thousand dollars more than I was making at Edited. But ConvertKit is a company that also has some great that benefits. Like they do a vacation
bonus they do profit sharing you get to share on the
profits of the company. So I felt confident that
it was a smart decision salary wise and that I
was gonna be making more as well as having a
better work life balance with this whole remote thing In stark contrast to that previous role where I had no raises I've had quite a few increases in salaries since
I've been at ConvertKit. I ended up getting an 8 to 10% raise every six months for
the first little while until the company did
something that I really like and introduced those standardized salaries that I talked about in the beginning. So this is based on data
collected by Radford. They put together a report on the industry for lots of different roles within Tech. They give you an idea of
where the market is at what the market range is for different roles at
various different levels. Companies can purchase access to this data and choose what percentile
of the market rate they want to meet when
paying their employees. So when this got introduced I was set as a Level Three Web UX designer and my salary increased
to 85,000 US dollars. Now like I said negotiation
hasn't really been much of the through line in
this salary history has it? But I got a chance to practice some negotiation skills earlier this year when I decided to advocate for myself to be moved up from Level
Three to a Level Four. Each level within these
standardized salaries has a description of the
skills and responsibilities that you are expected to have and be responsible for at
each different level. So I essentially took a look at what the Level Four ones were
and made a case for myself and talked to my manager and he agreed that it was time to move me up a level. This resulted in a 23.5%
increase in my salary which is very cool and
I was proud of myself for having advocated for myself, you know. We just recently got in a new
years worth of Radford data and they remapped all the
salaries in the levels and that sort of thing and so I ended up getting a little bit of an increase there because the market rate
for my job has increased. So right now my salary
is 115,000 US dollars which is 9.5 increase on what
I was earning previously. And because those
salaries are standardized I can expect that I'll stay at that level either until the market
rate for my role changes until the company decides
to change the percentile at which we're meeting of
these industry averages or until I get a promotion
to be moved up a level again. This way of doing things means that I'm not getting those 8 to
10% regular every six months raises like the ones before
but I like a lot better because I know that I'm being paid fairly and I know that everyone else on my team is being paid fairly as well
and that's important to me. I don't know if these numbers
are surprising to you at all, either surprisingly low
or surprisingly high depending on where you're
coming at this from. I know that I could be
earning a lot more for my role if I wanted to work at
a bigger tech company or perhaps one of the hot start ups with the low VC funding
that sort of thing. You can get some some very high salaries at those sorts of companies. But what's more important to me is quality of life, working
for a mission driven company that I believe in and doing work I love So, yeah I'm happy with
where I'm at the moment. I hope this is interesting to you to hear about my career history
from the salary perspective. Keep in mind like I said at the start that none of these numbers should
really be used as a benchmark. There is location and experience and inflation even to consider. But yeah I hope it was interesting for you to hear about nonetheless. Thank you for watching I've left a link in the description to a podcast episode because if you didn't
know I have a podcast called Design Life with a cohost. My friend Pamka who works at
Uber, she's a product designer. And we did an episode where we talked about compensation and negotiations. So if you want to dive more in depth on all that stuff, be more about it then go give that a listen
through the link below. Thanks for watching and I'll
see you in the next video. Bye! (upbeat electronic music)
