Salary Story: Seeing Colleagues Made Redundant Helped Me Move On — Now I Make £25k More

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Age: 35
Location: Oxford
Current industry and job title: Project manager, life sciences industry
Current salary: £64,000
Number of years employed since school or university: Eight

Starting salary: £27,000 in 2015
Biggest salary jump: £39,520 to £64,000 in 2023
Biggest salary drop: Never had a drop

Biggest negotiation regret: Talking myself down when trying to negotiate my salary. When I asked for an additional £1,000 per year in my third job, I prefaced this by saying “I know I don’t have project management experience”. This was such a disservice to myself since I had a project management qualification and a lot of what I did within my last role was project management, as I had been clear about in my interview. Perhaps because of this they didn’t offer any more, but I did get them to review it after three months in the role — at which point they did increase my salary by £1,500.

Best salary advice: Have an idea as to how long you want to be with a company when you start, then try to make sure you leave before you feel desperate. For my first two jobs, I was desperate to leave and just took the first job offers that came my way and, by and large, failed to successfully negotiate my pay. I would love to be in a position to take or leave a position and really empower myself to negotiate my salary. If they won’t negotiate, I should to feel that I am in a position to walk away.