8 tips to grow your salary in Singapore today

With the ‘Fair Consideration Framework’ measure that is recently introduced by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), it gives the local and foreign PMEs in Singapore, a more level playing field in the job market.

When the competition becomes fairer, the need for competing on the basis of merit will therefore be more emphasized on in order to enjoy a better salary.

Here are 8 tips (from a marketer’s point of view) on how to grow your next paycheck:

1) Think Big

Set big goals and aspirations. Plan ahead and work hard towards achieving them.

Be very specific in your goals. For example, know how much salary you want and by when you want to achieve these goals.

When you have very clear and specific goals, naturally you will know what to do so as to achieve them eventually.

2) Do Not Belittle Your Self Worth

Everyone has equal opportunity to grow. You have something that others may not have and that is your own self worth.

So, do not shortchange yourself by accepting lower than your expected salary jobs. At the same time, do not let others people around you to belittle your worth too. Work with people who can appreciate your worth and can able to give you many opportunities to showcase your talents.

3) Show Results

Results matter.

Each result is like an achievement milestone that helps you to get a step further towards attaining your goals. Results vary among people in different industry and job scope.

For sales people, sales are the results. For managers, team growth and unity is what that matter. For administration and backend department people, efficiency and responsiveness at work are important key performance indicators. And for people in the service industry, each happy customer will be an achievement milestone.

Hence, look into your job scope and measure your work achievements.

4) Learn and Apply

Learning is a never-ending journey. Keep on learning new things even after you have graduated. For knowledge that you already acquired, you can always learn it again and somehow you might gain a newer (or better) perspective from it.

The best way to remember what you have learnt is to apply it in your course of work. So, keep on learning!

5) Brand Yourself

Sometimes, you also need a little bit of publicity to brand yourself. Tell people who you are and what are your expertise and skills. One of the best ways is to share your opinions and knowledge in the blogosphere.

The more you brand yourself, the more other people will perceive you as the expert in your industry. And naturally, your industry value (and paycheck) will grow as well.

6) Open up Your Network

Make more friends and make zero enemies.

One of the best methods is to make use of the Linkedin network to connect with the industry professionals as well as the headhunters.

As you increase your professional network, always learn to be humble and treat people equally. This is because you will never know who can potentially help you to grow and give you better job opportunities and career prospects in the future.

7) Take on challenges when necessary

Sometimes, we often heard people saying, “Sorry, this is out of in my job scope. I am not able to help.” Well, why not be a little different by saying something like this, “This is interesting, let me try to help!”

Learn to take on new challenges at work when the need arises. But of course, learn to be selective too.

Select the challenges only if you feel that by achieving these challenges, you can help yourself as well as your organization to grow. Learn to reject tasks that you feel that will waste your time and make you unproductive to your company and your own growth.

Moreover, learn to negotiate for a higher salary when you can prove yourself that you can take on newer responsibilities and challenges.

8) Ask for the Pay Rise

As you continue to show actual results for your company and you feel that it is about time to get a higher salary that commensurate your worth; you need to ask for it.

A lot of people have ‘stumbled’ at this, they may feel that by asking for a pay rise may somehow make them look bad in the eyes of their employers. So, they would rather wait for their employers to give them the pay rise ‘one day’. And that ‘one day’, may not happen at all.

Just ask for the pay rise and something will happen. It is either a yes or a no. You have nothing to lose! But if you don’t ask for the pay rise, nothing will happen.

There you have it, the 8 tips of how to grow your next paycheck. Do remember to treat me lunch if my tips work for you, okay?