How to ask for a raise in the IT/Computer field!

Posted on March 5, 2007 at 6:23 pm

So you want to get a raise and you think you deserve more than what you’re getting right now, correct? Well good, just about everybody thinks that! And for those who don’t think that, well they will probably never get a raise!

But if you do think that, it’s the first step to actually getting one! You need to have your mind working in that “I want a freakin raise” mode in order to actually accomplish anything! It’s like all these big self-help guru’s say, if you want to start doing anything (like selling something or meeting people), you need to start thinking you can do it and that you WILL do it. If you don’t think you can do it, then you never will and there is no point in you working! Why work and never get more than you are getting now!! That’s stupid right??? So think that you can get a raise first!!!

Ok, so thinking is great, but that’s not going to do anything right??? Well it’ll give you the courage to talk the people that control your salary and present your side of the story in a well-planned and effective way. And you have to prepare!! I’m totally with the bosses when some people just randomly walk into the boss’s and demand that they get paid more because they have been around for a long time or some other silly reason and the boss basically tells them that they are getting paid what they are worth to the company – sorry!

So how to prepare!? And what do you prepare? Prepare yourself for doing some work! ;) Basically, you need to make yourself known…you cannot sit in front of your computer all day looking up cool new gadgets and checking out the latest server hacks because that’s not doing anything for the company! You need to do something that will improve a process that will lead directly to an increase in productivity or revenue. The more of these things you do, the more important you become and the move leverage you have when it comes time to talk to the boss.

Try to think in terms of making money for the company…helping the bottom line. First determine what is your company’s bottom line? What is it that if they stopped selling or producing or creating, would completely end our company? Once you figure that out, then you can start to think about how you can go about improving something. You might ask, well with all the daily IT stuff that needs to be done (fixing user issues, programming, managing the network and security) where do I get the time to do these other things? Well, you need to present that to your boss also and show them in exact amounts how much money, time or effort could be saved if you were to implement your solution.

For example, in my office once a product was complete, the production team would generate an invoice on paper with the client info, price, what was done etc, and then at the end of the day, they would take all of them to Accounting and ask them to send the invoice to the customer. Accounting would take the invoice, re-enter all the information from the paper into our Accounting program manually and then print everything out and give that to the mailing department. Now you can imagine all this work being done manually would cause lots of errors and you are right! Sometimes production would forget to give the invoices to accounting and then there would be a backlog of invoices. Accounting would enter the information into the system incorrectly and clients would complain about the billing. The amount of wasted time and energy, plus the frustration for the client was stupendous!!! So we created a system that would allow production to enter the information electronically and it would automatically be transferred to the Accounting system and all Accounting had to do was press “Print”. Now that saved time, money, energy and made our clients a lot happier!

These small projects can pay off big, especially in a small company! These things are hard to do in larger companies and can take months to years, but if you work in a small company (like I do), then you can get these solutions done from start to finish in a couple of weeks to a few months.

Other ideas to think about:

1. Does your HR Department have tons of papers flying about trying to manage absentee forms, late punches, time off requests, new hire orientation, resumes, etc. Can you create a internal portal web site to manage all of this without the paper and give automatic responses to employees or applicants?

2. Does your company carry inventory, but not have a way to track it effectively? Do people know how much stuff is coming in, how much is already there, and when to re-order? You can easily get a open source solution or pay a small amount for inventory management software to reduce over-stocking or shortages.

These are more generic, but your company will probably be doing something unique and that process will surely have it’s share of problems that can be improved.

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