Job Title or Salary : Which one to choose ? This question always creates confusion among freshers as they are not so much informed about the choices available and always go for big handsome salary or some fancy high profile designation while joining a company.
Bigger companies often have salary ranges written in stone. And if you get to the top of that range for your particular job, the only way to get more money is to get a new title. Your title matters for more than just your salary too. It’s about getting the respect you deserve within your company and about setting yourself up for career success and progression beyond your current job.
There were two sets of factors in the workplace. One group, known as motivators, cause satisfaction. These are things like job profile, achievement, advancement, interest in work. The other group, called hygiene factors cause dissatisfaction if they are absent and salary is part of this group. So, if you don’t earn enough you will be dissatisfied. But once you earn enough, extra money counts for very little.
When there are four or five things that you’re doing that you have no business doing based on your job description, that’s the time.The day you notice it is time for a new title. Recruiters look at your current pay to decide if you’re good, bad or indifferent. So if you are getting paid manager money with the title of director and you happen to be a woman so you’re already 20 percent underpaid, you look really bad for the next level step. That’s a huge issue. Plus, your promotion without a pay raise is the definition of underpaid.
It is better to focus on the learning part during your initial days of employment, where you can cope up with the trends going on in the industry. Hence by choosing the right profile and a proper learning platform after you are confident enough then one can switch by considering salary as a priority for their next job. If you have an excellent job profile and you know your work well enough, you will certainly get a salary hike which best suits your caliber.
Money can cause satisfaction and dissatisfaction in other ways too. We tend to benchmark ourselves against our peers.To anyone on a normal salary, this may sound ridiculous but it’s not actually about the money, it’s about the recognition. It’s also very easy to get trapped in high-earning jobs. You get the phenomenon of ‘economic prisoners’ where you wind up stuck in a job you hate because you need the salary to support your lifestyle.
So, is it more important to earn a lot of money or have an interesting job profile? The answer is that you need to step back and ask yourself what is important to you – while reminding yourself that your work does not exist in isolation. However, we can say that earning vastly in excess of what you need is not likely to make you happy and if you have the choice between a job that interests you and pays enough and one that doesn’t interest you and pays far more, you should go for the former.
While you’d rather have the title and all the cash that comes with it for some people having a more impressive title is compensation enough. After all, with a higher title comes more respect within the company. It also allows you to negotiate a higher wage after a performance review, and to ask for more money when you start looking for a new job.
