Stuck at Above Market Pay?

Believe it or not, if you find yourself making above market pay for your position, that may not necessarily be such a good thing.

For instance, we’ve all heard stories about college seniors receiving six-figure offers straight out of college. Personally I’ve never seen this happen, but it’s not inconceivable. Still, it does point out that for whatever reason salaries can sometimes get out of whack.

Perhaps you’re really good at what you do, and perhaps you have a deep knowledge and understanding of your company’s systems that no one else has. Either way, your company has seen fit to reward you with generous raises. And now you think of yourself as having decent, but necessarily stellar pay.

So when you realize that your company doesn’t want you to grow beyond your currently very essential role, what happens? You’re surprised when you talk to recruiters and they only mention jobs with significantly lower pay than yours. And the jobs that do pay in your salary range are ones you’re not qualified for.

So what do you do in this case? It just so happened that while the great raises have fattened your wallet, they have also limited your career mobility. If your pay is too big for your britches at this stage in your career you have relatively few options. You could stay at your job, where your pay will eventually plateau and the market will catch up with your pay. Or else you could make a lateral move to another job that pays less than what you’re making, in the hopes that you’ll grow in that position and catch up to and exceed your previous pay level.

In my case, I once had a great job where I got double-digit % raises for several years in a row. Unfortunately all good things had to come to an end, and this company enacted a pay freeze (probably to make up for being so overly generous before). So when I decided to look around for new opportunities, I found that my pay was around 20% over market. I was a bit miffed, but there was not much I could do about it.

After much soul searching, I ended up taking a new job that paid about 10% less than what I had been making. And I did eventually catch up to my old pay level, but it took a couple of years.