Lesson 2 - Transcript
Where to Begin?
Kathy:
Hi and welcome to Real Raise 101. I’m Kathy Dailey, producer of Real Raise, here today with David Hubbard. In today’s lesson, we’ll take a look at where you are now in your job skills vs. raise getting skills, and determine where you want to go.
But first, let’s look at why getting a real raise every year is crucial to your career and financial well being.
Alright, Kathy. Let me start by throwing out some reasons that may not be obvious.
Career survival. In an economic downturn, people with real raise skills will come out on top. If there is a layoff, they’re usually the first to be rehired. They lose the least amount of ground economically. Stay tuned to Real Raise to find out why.
Compounding. Raises compound like bank interest over the years. Next year’s raise is always computed on this year’s salary, which of course is the result of last year’s raise.
If you go to get a new job, the new salary will be based, in part, on your current salary, again based on last year’s raise.
How about interesting work? Can getting a raise to help you work on more interesting tasks?
It usually works out that way. Better paying positions tend to have more responsibility, freedom, and less BS.
Additional benefits. As you start to make more in salary, you’ll also be offered more benefits, like profit-sharing, insurance, company contributions, company cars, stock options and such.
And choices. You’ll have more choices in the types of work you do. This is a key tenet in the real raise philosophy. You’ll learn how to create a variety of choices in your career. Lots of choices, all better.
Have you ever noticed that the better offices are occupied by the better paid employees?
And respect. Needless to say, higher paid employees have more value, and command more respect.
A more flexible schedule – often those who are paid a higher salary have more options in scheduling their time at work.
All of these become available to you as you start to climb the pay scale.
And of course the money is important too.
Some people downplay how important money really is. I hope you’re not one of them.
We live in an incredible era. There are many wonderful things we can bring into our lives; homes, cars, travel; and they all cost money.
Money might not buy happiness for you, but I’m sure it would help.
Think for a minute.
Are you currently able to afford all the travel you would like?
Are your vacations dictated by budget?
Will your kids (or future kids) have the money for the kind of education you would like them to have?
Are you in a position to afford medical expenses not covered by insurance? I’m not talking about the $10 co-pay on routine prescriptions. I’m talking about life extending ‘elective’ procedures, cosmetic surgery. I’m talking about extraordinary kinds of expenses people encounter all the time. Things that are not covered by standard insurance.
Is your retirement funded the way you would like? Or are you counting on social security? Have you heard anything positive about social security lately?
Let’s face it. There are more things to spend money on than you can possibly cover on an average salary.
And let’s think for a moment about those Cost of Living Adjustments. We hear in this country that inflation is 2%. I don’t know about you but the inflation I face seems to be more than 2%. The official figures don’t weigh in the costs real estate and energy, which are very high. They’re more focused on food, clothing and other ‘hard’ goods.
In my world energy and real estate costs are huge and they go up at 6% a year. My medical insurance has gone up 9% each year for the last 6 years. If you have kids, I know your inflation is higher than what the government tells us.
So, raises are important.
Let’s take a few moments now to look at where you are right now in the raise getting world, and where you need to go next. In order to help you visualize this, we’ve created a handout that’s available on our website. So if you’re at your computer, go to www.realraise.com/studyguides, all one word, and download and print out the pdf file titled Quadrants.pdf. Again, that’s www.realraise.com/studyguides, and print out the Quadrants pdf file.
If you aren’t able to print out the handout right now, we’re going to try to describe it verbally as best we can. Please use your imagination to follow along.
The raise quadrants diagram is a graph of applied job skills vs. applied raise getting skills. For simplicity, we’ll just refer to them as job skills and raise skills.
To simplify the graph for the purpose of this discussion, we’ve sectioned the graph into four quadrants. Each of these is labeled either A, B, C, or D, and represents a combination of high or low job skills with high or low raise skills.
Moving from left to right on our graph indicates improving job skills. The further to the right you are, the better your applied job skills are, and hopefully, the more money you make.
When I say job skills I mean the skills that you use at work right now to bring value to your employer. Both the raise skills and the job skills we are talking about refer to applied skills. In other words, it doesn’t count if you have a skill but are not using it in what you presently do.
Going from bottom to top represents your applied raise getting skills. If you’re toward the top, you have excellent raise getting skills. The higher up on the graph, the more money you make.
At any point in time you have been in one and only one of these quadrants for the job that you had at that time.
Let’s begin looking at the various quadrants.
Let’s start with quadrant A.
This quadrant is in the upper, right hand region of the graph, representing people with both the highest job skills and the highest raise getting skills. So you’re in this quadrant if you rate both your job skills and your raise skills as high.
In our handout, this quadrant is filled with lots of money signs, and lots of happy faces. The people in this quadrant make the most money of any of the quadrants.
Staying toward the top of the graph and moving to the left, in the upper left region is quadrant B. These people have low job skills and high raise skills. This group makes less money than the A’s due to their undeveloped job skills. They have fewer dollar signs and happy faces than quadrant A.
Underneath the B’s, in the lower left region of the graph is quadrant D – low job skills and low raise skills. This quadrant has very few money symbols, and sad faces.
These people make the least amount of money. We all started here, at one point in our careers.
The good news is, you can leave this quadrant forever by simply learning real raise skills. You only have to learn them once, and they’ll be with you for the rest of your career.
Last but not least is quadrant C, over in the lower right side of the graph. People in this quadrant have good job skills and under-developed raise skills. Many of the real raise students are in this quadrant. There aren’t as many money symbols here, and the people generally aren’t as happy financially as the ‘A’ group above them, who have better raise skills.
In a perfect world, the C’s would make as much money as the A’s. But in the real world, they make less than the A’s and sometimes less than the B’s.
Before you become too envious of the quadrant A group, the top earners, understand that there are some downsides to being there. Employees in this area have the most limited ability to move anywhere else because they’re already at the far end of the financial spectrum. Their job skills are already good, and their raise skills are very good as well.
Which quadrant are you in?
Which Quadrant do you want to move to next?
Before you answer those questions, let’s look at some of the features of the quadrants.
Which group is most valuable to employers?
The C’s, right? Low raise skills and high job skills. They get the job done and they are cheap.
Which group is least valued by employers?
High raise skills and low job skills, that would be the Bs. Are you with me? The Bs are expensive, yet less skilled.
Now let’s look at which quadrant has the most options for getting a raise, and which has the least.
The D’s, with low job skills and low raise skills, can improve either skill to move up the pay scale. So if you are in quadrant D, don’t feel bad. You’re in a great place for getting raises. You have nowhere to go but up financially. Just don’t stay a D too long!
And which is easier to improve, job skills or raise skills?
That’s going to depend on what you do for work. I can say that raise skills are not hard to pick up if you practice them. You’ll be able to judge this better for yourself by the end of Real Raise 101.
Let’s look again at the A’s - high job skills and high raise skills. What are they going to do to get a raise? What quadrant is next for them?
What does happen to A’s? Are they stuck? Lots of Real Raise students become A’s for a while, and I assure you, they are not stuck. They aren’t stuck, because they move into new, higher paying skill areas, where they start as beginners for those skills in the ‘B’ quadrant.
If you are in quadrant A, we’ll be addressing your hope for the future through increased options and alternatives in your career. We’ll talk later more about what that means, but know that there is hope, even if you find that you’ve bumped up against the end of your financial range for the moment.
Let’s look more closely at the B’s. Where do you think they fall in the employer’s mind? Well, they have low job skills, but high raise skills. So wouldn’t employers like them least? And how do you think B’s would fair in a lay off? Probably not so well. Sometimes they can make almost as much money as the people in the A quadrant. If they do, it’s to the extreme annoyance of their coworkers, who are hanging out in quadrant C. These employees become the least prized by employers because they’re very expensive, yet not that good.
Employees in quadrant C have high job skills, but lack some of the raise getting skills that we are sharing in Real Raise. They become frustrated, because they see the A’s making more than them. That doesn’t seem fair, because the A’s have the same level of job skills and yet they’re making more. And sometimes even the B’s, with low job skills high raise skills, make more.
Quadrant C is where employers want you to be. It’s cost effective for the company. And they have strategies and schemes for keeping you there. Have you ever been the employee of the year? That’s a strategy to keep you in quadrant C. You’re getting recognition rather than financial reward in return for your outstanding performance.
Outstanding performance is a great place to start in the raise getting process. But by itself, notice that you still fall short financially of the people in quadrant A, as well as the people in quadrant B sometimes.
If you are in quadrant C, you stand to benefit substantially by improving your raise getting skills, and you’re absolutely in the right place to do that.
So now, let me ask again, which quadrant do you want to move to next?
If you have the printed diagram in front of you, draw an arrow from the quadrant you’re in right now to the one you want to be in.
Understand that job skills may change over the course of your career. You may do different jobs, and in some you may be in the high range of skills, and in others you may be at the low end.
Regardless of your job skill, you can always make more by improving your raise getting skills.
I hope you can see that getting a raise won’t necessarily make you the most valued employee in your company. You’ll just become the best paid employee for what you do.
There is a trade off here.
If you insist on being the most treasured employee in your company, you’re going to have to give up wanting a raise, because being inexpensive is part of being treasured.
What do I mean by that? Let’s look at raises from your employer’s perspective.
Your employer is there to make money for the company that you work for. From a business perspective, giving out raises and making money are in conflict with each other.
Let’s look at another factor. Do businesses give raises, or do people give them?
Of course, it’s the people within a business that give out raises. And when do these people give raises? When they want to.
So when do they want to? When there’s a political reason or it would benefit them personally. Usually their interests are in line with the company because companies are structured that way. Ultimately, it’s what benefits them personally.
But I’m getting ahead of myself…
We went through the quadrant diagram so that you can see that you will have a slightly different roadmap to getting a raise, depending which on which quadrant you’re in right now. That’s something that always drove me nuts with the conventional raise getting advice.
It seemed like that advice was always written for the folks in quadrant D, and it never tried to account for the differences in where you might be in your career.
Now, remember in the last lesson, there was an assignment?
To refresh your memory, the assignment was to print out and sign the Expectation
agreement.
Did you do it? Well, if you did, you’re well on your way toward getting a raise.
The exercises are not designed to find out if you can do the exercise. They’re so easy. They are designed to find out if you will do the exercise.
They let you know if you are in the ‘I’m getting a raise soon’ category or if you’re in the ‘well, this is interesting and I might use it someday’ category.
So, the exercise for this lesson is to print out the raise quadrant diagram and draw the arrow from where you are to where you’re going next, as I mentioned earlier.
Could that be any easier? I know you can do it in your head. And I know this sounds goofy but if you can’t do it on paper, you probably can’t get a raise.
So that’s it for this lesson. Be sure and go to our website, www.realraise.com/studyguides, download the Quadrants pdf exercise, and draw an arrow from where you are now to where you want to go next. Feel free to listen to any of the lessons, but remember, when you get our next email, listen again and stay current with the course.
Thanks for joining us today, and we look forward to having you join us for the next episode of Real Raise 101.
