Negotiating 20 % pay raise in your appraisal?

Have you ever thought what 20 % pay raise would mean to your Company? When I asked this question to one of my colleague, he amazed and after a slight pause he replied “Well I have no idea, my salary is not increasing, expenses are increasing , children education is becoming costlier, my boss is not happy with me, I don’t know if I am really doing what I should do?”. This is the situation of most of the people in mid career stage. One is not sure about the future, here are few tips to keep oneself abreast with the changing time to keep one’s growing in each sphere of life-

1. Setting Priority-We often forget to identify and to set the priority in our career, this is prevalent in mid career stage. We are relatively agile during the early stage of our career; switching jobs, changing technology, changing domain and even changing the industry, in other sense we are risk taker, that is why we grow both professionally and personally. However with the time, our thought process tend to become monotonous, and we start loosing the agility and hardly try new things. Setting right priority and taking risk remove monotony in our thought process and work and bring back us in growth path. Keeping in mind the 80/20 rule, you can always work on 20% of your priority list which constitute the 80% of change.

2. Keep Learning Attitude-Recently , I asked to one of my colleague With the time our learning gets slacken and require bit of extra effort to learn new things, develop new skill and expose your self to new technology. Pursuing higher education, obtaining certification, going through with part time courses help in maintaining the learning path in one’s career. If you can justify that there is 20% increase is your skills level to your boss that would help him to place your case better to the company.

3. Link Your Performance with the Growth of the Company- Well most of the organisation has performance linked growth at top management level, or so called CXO level. With the changing dynamics of the market, sustaining growth for long run require meticulous planning and strategies. However at middle management level, it would be hard for negotiating 20% growth or so if the company hasn’t grown with the same pace during the year. Keeping the watch in the quarterly growth and overall growth of the company would help you to align yourself accordingly while you are pitching for appraisal cycle. I appreciate your feedback and comments to help in Negotiating 20% raise in one’s appraisal.