What Are You Worth?

Knowing the extent of your value plays a crucial role in bringing you satisfying and rewarding employment. You can look at this goal from two angles: emotional fulfillment and financial compensation. These two approaches don’t have to be mutually exclusive, either—you can have them both.

To satisfy the emotional aspect, you need to determine what elements rank high on your list for a desirable employment situation. Do you prefer working mainly on your own and completing most tasks independently or do you enjoy tackling challenges as part of a close-knit team? Does a fast-paced, constantly changing environment energize you or exhaust you? Is public recognition of your accomplishments highly important to you or does your greatest satisfaction come from contributing to the well-being of others?

These are the types of questions to be asking yourself when you’re targeting your next job. Research the companies and the jobs—the culture, organizational focus, career path options, industry trends…in short, any information that might help you evaluate whether the job opportunities meet your “satisfaction criteria.”

Where do you find this information? The resources are too numerous to mention, and they include more than just the Internet, as valuable as that is—friends, family, professional associations, trade publications, librarians, and many more.

Assuming that all the pieces of the emotional aspect fit in place, you still face the task of determining what you can shoot for in terms of financial rewards from employers. This depends on a number of factors, of course, two of the chief ones being the strengths (skills, experience, and knowledge) you can offer employers and the monetary value the employment marketplace puts on those strengths.

Your best bet here, as with the emotional aspect, is to expand your knowledge about what other people in your targeted field or position are getting paid. Finding that kind of information is easier than it used to be. Salary surveys abound on the Internet and can be accessed from numerous sites. You can search by title, functional area, geographical region, and other elements to get a realistic sense of the range in which you fit.

If you can’t find an exact match for your qualifications, look for close approximations. They’ll still give you some useful data to work with in salary negotiations with prospective employers…or when you’re trying to pry a raise out of your current employer! Particularly if you’ve been with your employer for an extended period, your salary may not have kept pace with the “outside world,” and you might just want to try your hand at persuading your employer to sweeten the pot.

Value, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder, but giving your situation some deep thought and researching where you stand in the marketplace can do a lot to promote your success with employers. If you haven’t already started this exploration, do it now!

A Successful Career
Division of Adept Business Services
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Campbell, CA 95008-2824
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