by Karen Adamedes

What you earn throughout your career is dictated by many things – your profession, the industry you work in, the career moves you make and how well and hard you negotiate your remuneration.

Particularly each time you move into a new role or company. Once you are working for an organization it can be challenging to negotiate more than the annual allocation for salary increases that has to be divided up between all employees.

When you are negotiating to start a new job though the time is right to maximize your return on investment. That is the knowledge, skills and experience you have for the best possible salary package.

This is the time to negotiate. Hard. And well. Regardless of what discipline or type of organization you select, the opportunity is there for you to negotiate the best deal you can.

The place to start is by understanding what is negotiable.

Numerous items and benefits can be part of remuneration negotiations, including:

salary

performance bonus

flexibility – working hours or remote working arrangements

club or association memberships

study assistance

tools of trade – like laptops, cell phones and smart phones

health cover

shares or stock options – although you may need to be reasonably senior for this to be an option, and

parking space – ditto.

This list is not exhaustive and only some of these things may be relevant for your organization. Your company may also offer other benefits like childcare or health club memberships.

Find out which of these apply to your role and organization. If your job is with a company you haven’t work for before – ask your contacts or Human Resources or use your knowledge of the market to make a best guess.

Once you know what your options are you can work out what is most important to you, what you might be prepared to trade off (e.g. some benefits for flexibility?) and what is acceptable to you.

If you have done enough research and know what the role is worth in the market you may well have a minimum position that you’ll say “thanks, but no thanks” if they don’t make a fair offer. You need to know what your walk away position is. If you go into a new role feeling ‘ripped off’ – it’s unlikely your experience in that role is going to be very positive. And even more unlikely that you’ll get the remuneration to an acceptable level with single digit percentage increases each year once you’re ‘in the system’.

If you don’t ask for what you want – your new manager/company is unlikely to offer it to you. Your new employer is not going to weigh up whether money or working from home or bonuses is more important to you. They don’t have anyway of knowing your level of flexibility. You need to work it out and then talk to them about it.

If you ask for what you want and they say no what have you lost? At the very least you have gained more information to make a decision. Or can position an alternative. For instance, if someone can’t quite get to the base salary you want maybe they can include more in a performance bonus or let you work at home a day a week. If they really want you for a job a hiring manager wants you to be happy when you start in the role.

But in order to have those kind of conversations you need to know the options of what you can ask for – and what you want – and what you will accept. The more you know the better empowered you will be to make decisions when you are in the midst of the negotiation.

And you never know what could happen…they might actually say yes to what you ask for.

Career Tip To Go:

Understand what’s negotiable when you’re negotiating your salary package! And what you want!

Once you know what’s negotiable you’re one step closer – but there’s more you need to know before you start haggling! Keep an eye out for the next Career Tips To Go post – What you need to know before negotiating a new salary.

Check out our earlier post Why it’s important to earn what you’re worth!

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