As you begin to look ahead at the beginning of your campaign, the basic question of what you are worth should come up immediately., even if you cannot answer it right away. One of the best pieces of advice came from a civilian co-worker when I was stationed in Orlando and working at a detachment responsible for training and simulations work.
Rick explained to me in very simple terms that he noticed a lot of junior officers would think of their value in linear terms. Some of them, he would chuckle, used to look at their leave and earnings statement, write down the yearly base pay figure on it, and start a job search with that figure in mind. They'd home in on job postings either in the paper or online that matched their base salary, and figure that the job would be a good fit for them as well. Too often, Rick observed, the rest of the details of the job (which were usually lower-level management and sales jobs) often went ignored or glossed over. In the officer's mind, the money was the key to finding the fit, and they assumed that if they could find X job that paid the same as their yearly base pay, things would be golden.
The problem with this sort of analysis, as Rick carefully laid out, was that life in the military and life on the outside are two totally separate things when it comes to how far the dollar goes. Serving in the armed forces affords you allowances for housing and subsistence, commissary privileges, access to free medical care for you and often cheaper medical care for your spouse, life insurance that is ridiculously cheap, pretty much every federal holiday off from work unless you are deployed or standing duty, and a substantial chunk of available annual leave, tuition assistance and GI Bill benefits, reduced prices for family entertainment, Space-A travel, some of the best fitness centers imaginable, and a number of other benefits that simply do not exist in the civilian sector.
Is it possible to put a price tag of what those benefits are worth? In some cases, you absolutely can, like the simple differences in a load of groceries my wife purchases from the commissary versus the local Ralph's or Albertsons. In terms of life insurance coverage, it's possible to shop and compare the results against what you afforded access to under the terms of SGLI. Medical care gets real easy when you compare free to a standard package from Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
The point to all this is that when you evaluate yourself and what you think your earning potential should be in terms of work experience, training, etc., you need to sit back for a moment and consider what quality of life you want once you hit about the 90 day mark after your end of service. If you want it to be comparable to what you have now, then you need to find one of those forms that you received within the past year and take a hard look at it (for Marines, there is a tab on your MOL personal info screen that lays out your direct and indirect compensation). All things considered, the $$$ figure of that form is pretty close to the number you should be thinking about when you begin looking for a job. More importantly, when you get further along in your campaign and enter into salary negotiation (which you cannot do in the military), there is nothing wrong with going into it seeking to receive the highest salary possible. It may seem a little shocking when that figure is substantially higher than what your base pay is now, but that's okay, it shocked me a little bit too and made me a little giddy that they were willing to offer me that much. What I had a hard time remembering at the outset was that for the position my company was hiring me, the salary was comparable to that for other managers with similar responsibilities, and for the area of employment. It couldn't compare directly to what I had previously earned in the military, and so I had to approach the negotiations with the mindset that I had to conduct a lot of research and understand the forces at work, go for what I could reasonably request, and negotiate with the recognition that what I used to earn and hat I needed to earn would be significantly different numbers. A pretty dry but somewhat informative article from the Congressional Budget Office that talks about military compensation can be found here: http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=8271&type=0
The junior officer head hunters that I had started out with at the time were offering me nibbles at jobs that ranged from $20-30,000 less than what I finally ended getting paid at the job I took at the very end of my campaign. I did not jump at the first job offer, but rather continued my aggressive campaign, and while not stringing John Deere along, explained to them that I was still entertaining possibilities. I had thought through the compensation piece enough to realize that signing on with John Deere would actually mean I'd take a pay cut somewhere in the range of $15,000, and although the compensation package was in fact pretty handsome considering other employment opportunities in Dubuque, Iowa, it wasn't what I was worth.
Turning down a job offer is going to take a lot of discipline and resolve, but the good thing about a securing a job offer is the fact that you can probably do it again with a stronger company, in the region you prefer, and for better money. The key is to never let the headhunters undervalue you. You'll understand the importance of beating the head hunters at their own game in future posts.
Please comment on what you've seen so far with this blog, and give me some rudder steer on topics or insight that you would like to hear more on, if you don't see it being discussed in either the rules of the campaign, or my more detailed posts.
Also, if you'd like to hear from a guest blogger who has recently completed his campaign and is now working for a pharmaceutical company in sales, comment on that also and I'll try to have him swing by to discuss the advice I gave him, and how it worked out, and his recommendations.
Remember rule #3 and do something about the next phase of your life today (and no, reading this blog doesn't quite count)!
No comments:
Post a Comment