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The field of information technologies is one of the most promising in terms of personal development, career advancement, flexible job opportunities, and constant salary increase. Thinking about the ways to maximize your own one? This article with some actionable tips on how to improve your software engineer salary level will help you.
Just Ask for the Salary Increase
So let’s start with the simplest and most obvious way. In most cases, complicating simple things doesn’t make sense, so if you want to make more money, just ask for it. However, you need to know how to ask correctly. Of course, this is the conversation for which you need to prepare.
To do this, you need to summarize your experience in this company. Remember and write down the projects in which you took part, objectively assess your contribution to the development of each project, remember the situations when your ideas and solutions turned out to be really the best, supplement these facts with performance metrics and go to your team lead with a kind request to revise your bid.
Consider Flexible Schedule/Freelancing
And here is the second way. If you are confident in advance that talking with your boss about increasing wages is not the best strategy (for example, the company is going through difficult times), then you need to look for new opportunities. Consider flexible hours or remote work. Thus, you can devote your free time to finding new, more promising projects that have the potential to become your main ones.
Or, think about additional income on freelance terms. Now, many companies that cannot afford to maintain in-house programmers or outsource their software creation to dedicated developers, are looking for the right talents on freelance platforms.
Start Mastering the Highest-Paying Technologies
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For example, to date, the highest paying technologies are artificial intelligence and machine learning models programming, IoT, blockchain, VR and AR development, and data analysis. Considering some of these technologies and corresponding skills to get an opportunity to choose from the highest-paying and the most promising projects.
What’s more, according to numerous experts and researchers, these are the trends that are here to stay so mastering these technologies right now has a lot of sense. Also, there are a lot of free and paid but affordable courses on Coursera and Udemy that will help you to get started with the basics.
Leverage Your Foreign Languages
Knowledge of foreign languages is a significant advantage and a good reason to increase your value as a specialist in any field of activity. But of course, your choice of a foreign language for learning should not be random.
Start learning the foreign language that will bring you the most benefit – for example, the language of your customers or end-users. This will become your competitive advantage when it becomes necessary to explain to your customer the technical implications of the product that your team creates for them.
Pump up Your Soft Skills
Soft skills are just as important as hard ones. There is no doubt that you are a top-notch engineer, but here’s one more opportunity for you to increase your value and get another reason to ask for a raise. Start strengthening your soft skills. For example, team management skills, negotiation, stress resistance, and so on.
In simple terms, this advice sounds like try to be nicer and learn to have people close to you. Then, they themselves will begin to offer you more than you would ask.
Enhance Your Self-Presentation
The ability to present yourself is also important when you want to receive more than you are currently receiving. Start with a simple step – revise and update your resume. By the way, when was the last time you looked at this document? Today is just a good day to do that.
So, add projects that you have done recently to your resume, summarize your experience, and also update the list of your skills. To keep it simple, you can use a ready-made resume builder (plus, get a polished and attractive resume in the end).
This document will help you understand what you are really worth, and be more confident when you apply for a higher salary.
Prompt! Conduct market research in advance to be realistic in your expectations.
Relocate
And here is one more tip. Perhaps, to increase your salary you just need to choose a different country to live and work in. However, be wise about your choice. Here are two basic strategies you may follow.
- Firstly, you may consider the best countries for relocation as a programmer. For example, you may consider central European countries. As a rule, local software development companies offer decent salaries that will be even more than enough to cover the basic living standards, plus there are good work-life balance opportunities. For example, Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic are good destinations.
- Secondly, you should take a sober look at your current wage and consider some counties where the level of salaries is quite lower than yours. Thus, afford a quite good level of living for yourself, plus the opportunity to save a lot because of the significant salary differences. For example, if you are living in America or Europe, moving to African or Eastern counties may be a choice.
Never Stop Learning
Yes, this is a piece of quite hackneyed advice, however, this is one of the most relevant tips that are relevant for any job, even outside the field of informational technologies. However, as for the development of the innovations, new technologies appear faster than programmers get used to the previous ones, so in this case, constant learning and staying up to date is your guarantee of always having bread on your table.
So, keep learning daily and strengthen your theoretical skills with personal project development. Having a kind of personal portfolio with new technologies-powered projects will make it easier for you to prove your skills and change your job towards the higher-paid and demanded one.
Conclusion
As we have already said, the IT-sphere is extremely promising in every sense. And the fact that you managed to take your place in it, reach certain heights and start thinking about new achievements is already huge progress. Use the tips from our article to get as much money as you deserve to receive, and keep moving along the path of your self-development!