It's time to earn more.
Are you ready to earn more? Yeah? Heck yeah? Well, it's time to understand what sets our value it the marketplace and how we can shift that.
One of the advantages of being an entrepreneur is that you understand the labor market from the other side. You are no longer just an employee, waiting for someone to offer you a job. You are in the role of evaluating potential employees and deciding on their compensation. Today, I'm going to give you an insider's view.
Think of the labor market in three main tiers – the “blue collar” labor, “white collar” labor, and those top executives and founders who run the organization.
In general, blue collar folks work with their bodies to manage other people's physical stuff. So think of the sanitation worker picking up bags of trash and throwing them in the back of a truck. There's not a lot of mental work or training required. Because there are no special skills involved, this person is pretty much interchangeable with anyone else willing to do the work. In our economy, those doing unskilled physical labor are generally the lowest paid people.
A way to move up within the blue collar world is to develop a skill through a training or certification program, an apprenticeship, or on the job training and experience. If you start working as an assistant to a plumber and learn about plumbing, you have more skills and therefore are more in demand. Your value goes up, and your pay should go up as well. You should receive a pay raise from your boss as your experience and skills increase.
The next tier up is white collar labor. This is generally someone with a college degree who does their work with their mind. The bottom level of this tier is unskilled white collar labor such as an intern or new hire with an unrelated degree to the work they are doing. Often these people work for free (intern), but once they receive some on the job training they would move into a paid position.
Historically holding any college degree made you unique enough that education was a ticket from the difficult physical labor of the blue collar tier to an easier, air-conditioned job where you got to sit down and earn more money. While this is still true for most people over the long haul, the larger number of college graduates in the market today has brought the perceived value of a degree down. So it would not be unusual for someone with no specific job training included as part of their degree program to end up working as unskilled blue collar labor in the service industry, especially in a bad economy when jobs are scarce. So the tiers I'm describing are somewhat fluid, and there are definitely exceptions. For the most part, though, college degree holders do earn more over their careers than those without college degrees.
To start earning real money as a white collar worker, employees should look to add to their resumes. An English major with a project management certification will probably earn more, move up more quickly, and find more jobs than an English major without this credential but with the same experience. Any time an employee can distinguish themselves both through experience and through education they are likely to earn more.
The choice of what we study is important as well. We are coached in our society to think about what we want to do and pursue that. And while overall this is good advice (people generally don't last an entire career in a field they hate, and if they do it's not a nice way to go through life), if you are looking to get additional training to improve your career prospects, it would be worth your while to get an understanding of where the needs are in the market. If you are equally interested in two options, chose the option that is in demand.
As I mentioned, blue collar workers generally manage and maintain other people's tangible stuff (cars, homes, boats yards). White collar workers generally deal with other people's intangible stuff, such as businesses, projects, software, contracts, health, etc. This is an example of the difference in classes that Ruby Payne mentions in her work. Those who come from a lower class background may not have experience in thinking of intangibles as real and important, whereas those earning more often are focused on intangibles. In order to move up financially, some acceptance of intangibles (bank accounts, the stock market, schedules) as if they were real is necessary to be successful in this world.
So if someone is already a skilled white collar worker busy with the left-brain tasks of managing someone else's intangibles as if they were real, how can they earn more within that segment of society?
As previously discussed, developing unique and in demand experience or credentials is a good approach. Another great approach is combining things. For example, there may be many software developers, but a software developer who also really understands networking will bring a different dimension to discussions they are in. An artist who can also manage people may end up running a gallery. So moving up the ranks and getting education and expertise is fantastic, but eventually you will end up capped out. To move beyond that level, you must become one of the best of the best, combine unique complimentary skill sets, or manage people (which is really a combining of skill sets).
Another way to move up is to remove those things that are holding you back. If you find yourself overlooked for promotions and dissatisfied with your work, there may be a “soft skills” problem. If you are seen as good at your job but hard to work with, you will be passed over for promotions and first on the list for layoffs.
These soft skills problems are difficult to see. To the person with the problem, they do not have a problem – everyone else is the problem. Often co-workers will work around the person and avoid the issue rather than confront what is going on. We are raised to believe a person is who they are. So if someone is a jerk and can't see they are a jerk, plus I believe jerks can't be changed, I'll just avoid the issue, never giving the jerk an opportunity to understand that they are a jerk.
Working with a third party, such as a career coach, a mindset coach, or a therapist may help you to see what prior to that conversation you could not see. They may also help you address and move through the issue.
Suspect you have a soft skills problem you can't see? Contact me. I can help you remove the blocks to earning more.
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