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Question

IT support engineer - salary after 1 year

Mar 30, 2017 7:42AM PDT

Hello,

I have my 1 year appraisal coming up next month. I work as IT Support engineer, and before this job I worked as junior IT support engineer for 2 years. I am graduating with masters in Computer science in summer.
As I joined the company and had my probation review after 3 months of joining it also included the pay rise which made my salary to £23000 per year. Now I know during my appraisal I will be asked about what salary I would like. Person who was doing my job before me as on £33000, however she didn’t do much and left everything in such a mess. Now my question is how much should I be asking for my pay? I am not very good at negotiating, however I don’t want to be left in the position where I am underpaid because I didn’t know how much I was worth. I hear good comments from management and they always praise my work.

Any help is much appreciated.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Here, the pay can go down too.
Mar 30, 2017 8:29AM PDT

So if you get a raise, great. But as more automation is implemented this job area is at risk.

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RE: Here, the pay can go down too. (What?)
Apr 7, 2017 4:36PM PDT

First off, IT support engineer is rather vague. Here in the States that could be anything from a front line help desk position to a top paid salary engineer managing AWS, Google Compute, et al...
Going by that salary however it sounds like a front line help desk position, at least by our standards here.

Considering you now have a Master's degree, I would tend to seek higher levels of employment. With a MS, I'm assuming you have quite a bit of programming experience, so DevOps is a nice transition from your current role. IE Setting up playbooks for Ansible, recipes for Chef, et al for both server and routing infrastructure, creating monitoring systems to proactively find and resolve issues. Depending on what you specialized in with the degree, you could also just venture into your specialty, ex. DBA, network protocol design, graph theory, et al...

Really, it depends on what you want to do, computers are a vast collection of interconnected systems, so there is enough jobs out there for pretty much everyone with a desire.

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Unlikely pay would go down
Apr 8, 2017 8:46PM PDT

This young fellow has been a year in what sounds like an entry-level plus role. It is highly unlikely that he will be asked to take a cut, if that were to happen, I would be updating my resume. OR, at the very least, ask what other position is open that would better utilize his skills!

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Example.
Apr 9, 2017 9:14AM PDT

Company relocates from San Francisco, CA, USA to far cheaper digs in another state. Salaries take a hit too. Just one example of many.

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Answer
IT Support Salary
Apr 8, 2017 8:39PM PDT

Under all the circumstances, I think you need to remind management that over and above the job you have done in this position, your qualifications are nearing a new plateau. If you are certain of your facts about your predecessor's pay level, I would certainly be inclined to indicate that the £33,000 previously paid is not unreasonable. Point out that you inherited less than favourable conditions from your predecessor, and what you have done to improve on the role, plus specific successes you may be able to draw on.
Go a step further too and suggest that when your Masters is achieved that you would hope that too may be recognized in a tangible form. If asked, i would not hesitate to suggest an additional £2,000, all else being equal.
Does the employer have an established range for your position? What is their policy for future reviews and what are promotional opportunities? What observable trends are there in salary adjustments in-house?
All these questions need answers that should be factored into your posture. Good luck.