Earning two hundred dollars a week teaching English in a small French town. Fetching coffee as an editorial assistant in Manhattan. Fetching coffee as a legislative assistant in Washington. Wearing borrowed clothes to a business meeting because you can’t afford to upgrade your wardrobe. Sticking to a bare-bones budget by regarding a Subway sandwich as a perfectly adequate dinner.
Come out of college with a liberal arts degree, and there’s a good chance your first job will involve a brush with lean times. You won’t be earning nearly as much as you’d like. You may be stuck, at least at first, in a job that doesn’t do justice to your education or your potential. It’s faintly reassuring to hear outsiders insist this is just a brief rite of passage. Large-scale studies (such as the PayScale and Hamilton Project data cited in chapter 7) keep demonstrating that salaries for liberal arts graduates rise briskly in the first decade after college. Today’s humbling circumstances won’t seem so bad if a wave of opportunity is coming your way, vindicating the importance of your college training and your “try anything” mind-set.
Still, if better times lie ahead, shouldn’t the secret for escaping new-graduate poverty be right in front of you now?
It’s time to get tactical. Earlier chapters of this book have been packed with stories about strivers who started near the bottom and made everything work out. That low-paid English teacher in France was Emory Zink, years before she made her way to a nice analyst’s job at Morningstar. The fellow in the borrowed sport coat: Harvard classics graduate Tim O’Reilly before he started his own media company. That sandwich-eating legislative aide: Maine senator Susan Collins, in her first job out of college. And so on. Now it’s time to analyze what they did to get paid properly—and show how those techniques can be applied to almost any career.
Here’s a distillation of winning techniques, presented in a seven-stage model.
Step 1: Get Started—Anywhere
Spend your first year out of college building your portfolio on whatever terms the market offers. Say yes a lot. If you want to be a designer, bid for online work at sites such as 99designs.com. If you want to be a foreign-policy analyst, make the rounds of think tanks and find out who needs an extra chapter of a report written in a hurry. (Someone always does.) If you want to be a diplomat specializing in an unusual language, look for short-term translation opportunities with nonprofits and academic organizations.
As much as possible, don’t stress about pay. Share an apartment; take public transportation; put up with that older-model phone for one more year. Live at home if you and your parents can abide each other. Keep expenses under control so you can invest heavily in your own future. Embrace a five-hundred-dollar freelance assignment if you think it could boost your worth to employers by two thousand dollars or more. You may take on a few projects you never want to do again. But the era of cheap labor and dining at Subway won’t last long. As you gain experience, the pieces of your emerging portfolio will combine into an impressive mosaic of professional skills.
After six to twelve months, you will have an achiever’s résumé. You will stand out in a crowd. Better still, you will enjoy a wealth of contacts in the field you care about. Partners and hiring managers will know your work. They will keep you in mind if something closer to a full-time position opens up. They will introduce you to their friends and peers. It’s amazing how often a short-term consulting contract can turn into a full-time job. Employers discover you’re good at what you do! They also come to realize that their short-term problem isn’t going away and that they need a long-term solution if their enterprise is going to thrive.
Be adventurous. History major Chris Chrysostom has done a lot over the years to establish his credibility as a computer software engineer, regardless of his educational background. He has held down full-time jobs at eight companies, including 3M and CVS/Caremark. Even so, the credential that catches everyone’s eye—and wins him rapid consideration in a crowded field—is a freelance gig building a three-dimensional model of a crime scene. Over a two-month period, Chrysostom combined police photos, Google Earth images, and blood-spatter calculations to show how the vile deed must have taken place. Put something like that on your résumé, and employers will be itching to meet you. Take their calls, even if it’s unclear whether they want to hire you or merely find out more about your fascinating life.
Step 2: Zero In on Your Best Prospects
This is the most crucial power move of all. Once you’ve found a pool of people who appreciate what you can do, stop saying yes to everyone. Start putting your discernment to work. Focus on the business partners that can do the most to brighten your life. Perhaps they pay you the most. Maybe they speak most highly of your work. If they stand at the top of your chosen field, good. If they simply steer the steadiest volume of work your way, that’s fine too.
Regardless of how you draw this inner circle, draw it. Then start pitching more ambitious projects to your most desired partners. Develop an understanding of how they make money or meet their biggest obligations. Pay especially close attention to their pain points: elements of their businesses that aren’t going well right now and need a talent infusion to get back on track. Present yourself as the ingenious fresh thinker who can solve big problems if given sufficient time, resources, and money.
Make sure you’re pitching your services to people with big enough budgets to act on your ideas. As digital-content expert Andy Anderegg explained to me, if you’re dealing mostly with a section editor at a media site, he or she may not have authority to do more than buy articles one at a time from freelancers at low prices. Connect with the managing editor instead. Now you’re talking to someone with a much bigger budget who thinks in terms of story packages and entirely new channels. Rather than sell your expertise in tiny slivers, you start proposing six-month projects that approach full-time work. Suddenly, your pay conversations have an extra zero at the end.
Steer the conversation toward value-based pricing too. You’ve endured the frustrations of being paid the minimum you can tolerate on an hourly or piecework basis. Look for opportunities to migrate the money conversation to a healthier framework, centered on the value of what you create, regardless of the time involved. If you’re ready to play an important role on a project that could bring in five hundred thousand dollars of revenue for an organization, it’s allowable to argue that you should get 20 percent of that revenue for your contribution. Pick an ambitious (but not crazy) number, and then get ready to negotiate. If they bargain you down, that’s not a bad outcome at all. Even at 15 percent, you’ll be earning seventy-five thousand. Stylish clothes and trendy restaurants can become part of your new life.
Step 3: Make Yourself More Valuable
If Qualtrics, the Provo, Utah, market-research company, hires you straight out of college, you’re likely to spend your first few months in an apprenticeship program of sorts, called QUni. Most of the time, you will be fielding customer-service calls, but there’s a deeper agenda at work too. Marking time on client calls helps you learn the full intricacies of Qualtrics’ business; it’s also a fine way for you to devise a useful project that will make other departments want to hire you. Every month, Qualtrics’ high-prestige specialty areas take a look at QUni’s current pool of people. Impress the bosses, and you get “drafted” out—much like college athletes being picked for the pros.
Caroline Poole, a 2014 Furman graduate (BA in sociology), rocketed out of QUni in a hurry after she came up with a reverse-authentication tool to ensure that the same people didn’t get asked to participate in an anonymous survey twice. She also launched a user contest that invited Qualtrics customers to share offbeat ways they used the company’s market-research tools. Those displays of initiative won her a spot on Qualtrics’ partner-services consulting team, where recent college graduates routinely earn seventy thousand dollars a year or more.
Even if companies don’t offer a classic career-development track, put that QUni ethos to work on your own. Look at the way English major Andy Anderegg developed a training module for Groupon’s newest hires within a month or two of her own arrival. Take note, too, of the way that she became a leader in the company’s recruiting efforts. Within a year, those two initiatives had helped boost her pay 42 percent. The two areas that she picked—training and recruiting—are uniquely well suited to newcomers on the rise. You don’t need ten years of experience to emerge as a leader in those fields. In fact, you’re an instant expert, thanks to your own discoveries while getting hired and learning the job.
Step 4: Use Leverage Boldly to Win a Raise
For most of us, asking for a raise is awkward. We want to believe that our bosses recognize good work and don’t need to be badgered to do the right thing. After all, that’s (usually) the way professors mete out college grades. It’s jarring to realize that most workplaces don’t function that way. About 40 percent of workers tend to ask for raises every year, and they generally get them, according to PayScale data. As for everyone else… in too many cases, the quiet vigil for better pay yields nothing.
What can you do about it?
The challenge is especially intense if you are the liberal arts go-getter who started out with an unconscionably low salary and now is rising rapidly in terms of job responsibilities, output, and caliber of work. You’re still underpaid. You should be getting hefty raises to bring your pay in line with industry norms. Unfortunately, most corporations address such inequities quite languidly, if at all. The ugly truth is that managers’ own metrics tend to reward them for keeping costs down and productivity high. From afar, the injustice of your situation resembles good management.
The remedy, of course, is to ask for a raise anyway. Take a tip from Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who, in her book Lean In, offers a five-step approach to getting better pay without seeming self-serving. She wrote for a primarily female audience, but her advice transcends gender. Cite other people’s comments about your effectiveness. Remind your bosses of the gap between your current pay and industry pay norms. Let go of any bitterness about your treatment (at least for the moment), and look for ways to portray yourself, your manager, and your organization as a harmonious trio destined to promote one another’s best interests.
I’ve got two more points to add. First, start the pay conversation a little earlier than you think you should. Research shows that male/female disparities in pay can be attributed in part to the fact that men ask for raises more often—and more bluntly. Even if managers reply, “We’re sympathetic; we just can’t do anything right away,” that can be a useful first step. Begin your hunt for a raise when a few months of corporate inertia about the decision won’t infuriate you.
Finally, muster as much confidence as you can. If the strains of being judged by a wary boss seem unbearable, imagine that the real you is staying at home today, reading a book in a cozy armchair. The person doing the negotiating is your doppelgänger, equipped with a dossier that explains why you deserve a raise. Let this sci-fi clone do the hard work. He or she is an animated advocate on a simple mission: to champion your ingenuity, your hard work, and your impact.
Step 5: Take Command of a Project
If you’re working in a fast-growing field, it doesn’t take much seniority to be regarded as management material. Show up on time, do a good job, get along with your colleagues, and you are most of the way there. Bring some commonsense ideas into the conversation about how to make the business run better, and you will be regarded as a can’t-miss candidate for promotion.
Even if you don’t see yourself as a domineering, corner-office personality, embrace the idea that you can have a bigger impact—and a more fulfilling job—if you’re helping to set the tempo. Look at the way Andy Anderegg, LeAnne Gault, and Bridget Connolly all emerged as project chiefs, simply because they were doing a good job in areas where extra (and more junior) people needed to be hired. Experience and good judgment can make you an effective leader without forcing you to adopt a radically different personality.
Although some organizations still pay lip service to the idea that talented frontline workers can earn as much as some bosses, that egalitarian approach is becoming rarer all the time. A 2014 survey by Hay Group found that the pay gap between relatively senior U.S. bosses and lower-level employees now amounts to a four-fold difference in pay—and has widened more than 10 percent since 2008.
Don’t forget about stock options, guaranteed bonuses, restricted stock—and all the other perks that can come from moving into management. The class divide between skilled workers and low-level management may have narrowed from the 1950s to the 1970s, but it has been widening ever since. Relatively low-ranking managers can quietly add as much as 20 percent to their overall earnings by participating in various stock-based compensation programs that are reserved for the bosses. By contrast, even the most valued frontline workers are hardly ever invited into this inner circle.
As a result, the economic rewards for leadership have never been so attractive; the financial penalties for lingering too long without a promotion have never been so severe.
Step 6: Keep Investing in People
Tim O’Reilly, the classics major who founded O’Reilly Media, has a wonderful piece of advice for anyone whose influence is on the rise: “Try to create more value than you capture.” As promotions pile up, it’s tempting to hoard power by clinging to what’s already working or by maneuvering for the upper hand in each new situation. Leave those strategies to the wary. You can do better by sticking with the open-minded methods that have brought you this far.
Get to know younger talent and look for ways to bring rising stars onto your team. The higher you rise in an organization, the more your success will be judged by how well you develop other leaders too. Speak at conferences. Teach. Blog. Share your work. You will become more widely known and more widely admired. In the process, you gain a widening circle of allies—and a lot more serendipity in your life.
One of the reasons philosophy major Stewart Butterfield’s start-ups rise higher each time he starts afresh is that the best people associated with his earlier projects are eager to work with him again. When a consummate networker like Ashley Introne wants to switch jobs, lots of people whom she has helped along the way are looking out for her too. That reputation for doing well by others makes it easier for you to switch jobs gracefully—and to prosper even in turbulent times.
Being well networked has another payoff too. As you become better known, you will start getting unsolicited offers from potential new employers excited about the possibility of adding your dynamism in their organization. Say yes to the very best of those offers; use the rest as gentle (or not-so-gentle) bargaining chips with your current employer. While you can’t get ahead in the long run by threatening to quit every six months, you are allowed a few junctures in your career where you actively bargain for better. Tell your boss (or your board) that you’d love to stay, but you’re worried about being stuck in a situation where you’re earning 20 percent below what a leading competitor is willing to pay you right now. The usual reply: “What would it take to keep you?” Once that question is on the table, you’re probably only a few hours away from a big raise and roomful of smiling people.
Step 7: Keep Investing in New Ideas
K. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State, has attracted a lot of attention in recent years with his findings that the best classical musicians spend enormous amounts of time practicing the hard stuff, often before age eighteen. (You may recognize his research through the popularized variant of the 10,000-hour rule as portrayed by author Malcolm Gladwell.) If you want to excel in a field where standards of excellence were well defined more than a hundred and fifty years ago, Ericsson and Gladwell are right. There are no shortcuts.
Fortunately, most disciplines don’t work that way! New ideas keep coming along all the time. Early innovators reap gigantic rewards long before they have put in ten thousand hours at anything. They had the wonderful good fortune to be first, when opportunities were huge and no one else was fighting for them. Think of the way Soleio showed up at Facebook in 2005 with a music degree from Duke and some self-taught ideas about good design. Right place, right time. After Soleio created the “Like” icon, his fame and financial success in graphic design were assured.
Keep looking for such opportunities. Remember that most people crave predictability and are willing to endure very low growth in opportunities or income just to be able to keep doing what’s familiar, month after month. The effective habits that have propelled you into higher-paying situations also mean that you’re well positioned to spot the next big trend—and to harness it to your advantage.
The most successful journalists, bankers, historians, and entrepreneurs that I know periodically ask themselves: “If I were just starting out today, what would I be working on?” Often such opportunities arise at the junctures between two disciplines, where longtime experts lack the flexibility to see new ways of doing things. Newcomers welcome! Seize those chances. A decade later, as the rewards become clear, people will be asking: “How did you know?”