Feeling the Pinch? Do You Need A Cost Of Living Raise? Here’s How To Ask

While recent figures from the Office for National Statistics show inflation has fallen for the third consecutive month (currently sitting at 10.1% after October’s high of 11.1%), the fact remains that the actual cost of living continues to rise as salaries stay the same.

Britons are feeling the pinch in their pay packets.

While some professions are given annual increases of between 2-4%––still not enough to account for inflation––what can those who don’t benefit from annual salary bumps do to increase their income?

The obvious answer is to ask for a cost of living raise––but in the correct way to ensure you get what you need.

Stating that you need a salary increase because your heating bill is higher than last year might garner sympathy, but is unlikely to result in an increase to your monthly take-home pay. If you want to increase your salary, you need to put forward a financial case based on facts and figures, leaving any emotion or personal pleas out of it.

Establish Your Value

What do you bring to the company? This is not a trick question and now is not the time to act like a meme and answer with “style and humour”. What is unique about your skill set, and what company knowledge do you have that would be hard to replace if you left? Do you motivate your colleagues, or add value to your team?

Show Your Worth

How much money did you make the company in the last year? Did you lead a tender bid that increased profit margins, or perhaps you implemented a cost-saving process that saved the company a significant amount of money.

Maybe you pulled a team together to hit a target that otherwise would have been missed: Make your case by showing how much money your contribution to the workplace added to company revenues in the past 12 months––and explain how that is no longer reflected in your salary.

Know Your Bottom Line

What are people with your experience and skillset earning elsewhere? Do your homework so that you know your value, but also establish your bottom line. For example, if you currently earn £50k, and you could earn £70k elsewhere, but you actually quite like your job, are in line for promotion and have a good work/life balance, would you leave if your current employer offered £65k?

Knowing your bottom line means that you won’t act rashly or for the wrong reasons. Remember too, that not all compensation is financial. If your manager offered you a 10% increase instead of your expected 15%, but also gave you the option to work from home one extra day a week, could you make that work?

Knowing what you will and won’t accept and what will impact your personal life makes you better placed to negotiate.

Know Your “No”

You know your bottom line, but do you know your “no”, or the point where you’ll make a hard exit? Sometimes no matter what you do or no matter how skillfully you put forward a case, the answer to your salary increase will always be no.

It might be because your company doesn’t value its employees, but it’s more likely because the money simply isn’t there. If the answer to your request is negative, what are you going to do? You can ask to put a six month review on the request, with clear expectations set out by your employer on what’s required on your end to secure a salary increase.

Take note of what happens then: If management still says no, it may be time to accept that the money is not forthcoming, and start to look for alternative opportunities.

The Alt A Review Job Board is full of companies currently hiring across all sectors and pay scales. Below, you’ll find three exciting roles, representing just a sample of the range of roles on offer.

Sport UI Scheduling Manager, Sky, London

The Role: As Scheduling Manager at Sky you will work to plan the curation of the best live and on-demand sport content, sharing your plans with the wider business and across territories.

The Responsibilities: You will work closely with Sky Sports to pursue additional NOW opportunities, including sourcing extra video, and supporting teams by building collections, destination pages and takeovers using the in-house CMS.

The Requirements: You’ll have wide-ranging sporting expertise and a passion for quality TV as well as experience of planning, scheduling and curating demand video or live programming paired with an understanding of content strategy, and using data to inform decisions.

Apply for the Sports UI Scheduling Manager job, or browse all available opportunities at Sky.

Senior Batch Engineer, IBM, Manchester

The Role: As a Senior Computer Operator at IBM, you will maintain, support and help to enhance the mission-critical mainframe systems which support key internal applications.

The Responsibilities: You will work with experienced operators on one or more of the five teams in operations, monitoring and controlling the operation of the mainframe hardware and software.

The Requirements: Previous experience in support of large scale mission-critical environments is required.plus good knowledge level in JCL programing language, Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS), and TSO.

Find out more about the Senior Batch Engineer role, or see more vacancies at IBM.

Brand Manager, RS, London

The Role: As Brand Manager with RS you will provide input and feedback from the markets and solutions teams to help shape the ongoing refinement of the brand strategy.

The Responsibilities: As a brand manager you will be directly responsible for the rollout of campaign toolkits and brand governance across all markets, and will develop clear and concise propositions for products and service solutions.

The Requirements: You will have experience of working as an JBM with at least three years’ experience in a fast-paced marketing led organisation, with a strong track record of working with marketing agencies, and managing output and deliverables from these partners.

Apply for the Brand Manager role now, or discover more opportunities with RS.