Get Paid for Your Value

If you wish to find, and get paid for your value in the marketplace, look at the compensation for people at your level, in your industry, with a similar skillset. An online search or a call to a recruiter should help you. Is your compensation in line with where it should be?

Most economists would suggest that unemployment below 5% is where an economy starts to experience labor shortages. Once we get to this point (and the US is very close now) we typically see upward pressure on wages. Employees become more valuable because they are harder to replace. It’s simply supply and demand. Employees have more leverage. If you are on someone else’s payroll, and feel you are not being fairly rewarded, now is a good time to think about how you might enhance your compensation. As an employer, you want to ensure that your people feel appreciated.

Let’s assume that you are being compensated at or above your market value. As you look forward in your career, are you comfortable with your earning potential? If not, you need to look for ways to increase your value. The solution: enhance your skill set.

If you choose to build your skill set, look beyond trading your hours for dollars and identify scalable opportunities. Assume you are a sole practitioner working as a computer consultant charging $50 per hour, it will be difficult for you to make more than $500-$600 per day. You only have so many waking hours to do your work. You could hire more people, pay them $25 per hour and continue to charge $50, or you could figure out a way to get more scale out of what you do. What if you enhanced your skills such that you could teach large groups of people computer skills? You do it online, and charge each person $30 for a one hour session. You get 100 people to attend your virtual course. You just earned over 3,000 for one hour of work. That’s a week’s worth of your prior income in an hour.

Stop focusing on getting paid for your time and start looking at ways to get paid for your value. Find a way to maximize the return on the skills that you bring. Developing a scalable skillset is the most effective way to enhance your value and grow your income. At the very least, you should be getting paid for the value you bring. If your value is beyond your compensation, it’s time to do something about it. As long as you’re doing it, add scale to the equation.