I doubled my salary in five years.
Today, I’m sharing the story of how that happened. I’ll be discussing education completed, industries worked in, and qualifications & skills gained along the way. There are also a few specific things I did to achieve this that I want to talk about as well.
My journey may not be replicable, and that’s ok. This will be difficult or downright impossible to replicate in certain industries. This isn’t a blueprint to double your salary in five years. This is just my story.
I don’t write this to brag, either. There’s value in sharing this for transparency, to show that it is possible for people starting out in their careers.
With concerted effort, a bit of luck, and space to create opportunities for yourself, you could achieve similar results for yourself.
The only thing any of us can do to increase our salaries is try. And I want to share the story of what happened when I tried my best for five years straight.
Year 0 – Education & Pre-Work
Before we begin, I need to clarify a couple of things.
I have a bachelor’s degree in accounting & economics, which I completed almost a decade ago. I also worked in accounts payable for several years part-time while studying, and full-time once I had finished.
The experience I gained and the exposure I received to office culture was a huge advantage when starting out in my post-university career.
This all predates the five-year journey. And yes, this means I’m cherry-picking which five years of my career I use for the purpose of telling the story.
But you don’t mind that I’m doing that if the story’s good enough, do you?
Year 1 – Job 1 – Finding Payroll, and Finding a Purpose (100%)
After trying (and failing) to get an entry-level job as an accountant, I settled on continuing to work in finance-related roles. With a finance degree under my belt, I wanted to find a role that would allow me to make the most of it.
After a couple of short-term contracts, I found myself in a data processing role in a payroll department. My job was to transcribe paper timesheets into a roster database each day based on the adjustments from the day before.
I got the job without any payroll experience. But for this job, payroll experience wasn’t required.
They needed someone who had a high attention to detail and a willingness to learn. Two skills with a low floor – and perhaps a lower supply.
I attribute my career success to my willingness to learn. And being able to take on roles where I didn’t have a primary skill for that role is what I attribute to my career growth.
I took on this role during an implementation of a new timekeeping software, but I wouldn’t be interacting with that yet. My role was still responsible for paper timesheets, but my responsibilities increased to include payroll processing.
Payroll Processing
If you don’t know how payrolls are processed, allow me to enlighten you.
Many people believe it’s a press of a button and money magically goes into employee bank accounts. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Payrolls are typically processed by finalising timesheet data from site managers, then running these times through software that calculates the appropriate pay conditions. This might sound pedestrian, but certain regions (especially Australia) have extremely complex industrial agreements. These agreements control how wages are paid, including percentage penalties for working at specific times of the day or week, overtime, guaranteed minimums, allowances, and other conditions that greatly impact wages1.
After this, the pay components are categorised, deductions and taxes are applied, and audits & variance checks are done to check that employees have worked according to their contracted & recurring hours.
Unfortunately, due to system constraints, pay enquiries, manual processes and good old-fashioned human error (from employees, managers and payroll teams), things can go wrong.
Payroll teams are responsible for assessing why systems failed to calculate correctly, as well as manually correcting pay conditions.
Considering that payroll is many organisation’s largest expenses, the power of a good payroll team cannot be understated.
The Lightbulb
While studying accounting at university, I found the topic to be extremely sterile. It was fun and practical when learning it in high school, but university sucked all joy out of the subject.
Payroll reinvigorated that joy for me.
Payroll taught me that finance can be people-focused. That attention to detail in money could have real impacts on real people.
This was the purpose I wanted to find while working. And I was very lucky to have found a purpose that motivated me to work so early on in my career.
The duty of care I had to pay employees in my portfolio correctly was a massive driving force in making sure I knew everything I could about payroll.
I began to learn the underlying rules as to how pay codes calculated. Then, I used that information to test my understanding and see if I could calculate pays correctly myself. I even took it upon myself to read the industrial instruments that governed how employees were paid.
I didn’t take any calculation the system gave me for granted. Knowing why a pay was incorrect was how I learned to respond to pay queries effectively, and to provide quality information to my employee-customers.
This drive to constantly learn has served me well. But it was pivotal here as it led me to…
Time & Attendance
Time & Attendance refers to a series of software tools designed to ensure employees are paid for the hours they work.
These tools capture employee work times using biometric or badge scanners, and use software to determine how employee time calculates and is paid.
It just so happened that the company I just got a job with had implemented the software of the industry leader in this space.
As time passed and as I spoke to job recruiters and my team, I began to understand that this software was a premiere timekeeping system. So, I took advantage of that to learn as much as I could about the product. As members of the payroll team moved on and new ones joined to replace them, the collective knowledge of the system within the team was slowly disappearing. My knowledge, in proportion to the team’s knowledge, was growing.
I could see that this expertise was difficult to find. But I didn’t fully grasp the impact and potential of that until years later.
Eventually, I was one of the most tenured payroll officers remaining in the team.
As the implementation project began to wind down, we had to determine how best to provide training and support to end users of the product. The business was relying on external consultants to provide Time & Attendance training as required, but this wasn’t sustainable long term.
I put my hand up to take on the responsibility of running in-house training on the software. It would mean lots of learning, travelling, and a reworking of my role from being payroll-focused to being systems training-focused.
This was the turning point that moved me away from payroll processing and towards system administration & training – a decision that I would soon learn would be one of my best.
Year 2 – Job 2 – Payroll & T&A Training (110%)
The first year was a formative year, while the second built upon what I had learnt prior.
I was lucky in that my job offered me the opportunity to take on a new responsibility, but it was my initiative that made it happen.
If I didn’t put up my hand to take on the training role, it wouldn’t have happened.
This new role saw me provide Time & Attendance training to site admins so that they could get their employee timesheet issues resolved correctly. In addition, I still had some payrolls to process, and reviewed all paperwork processed by the team as quality control.
This new role also came with a small pay increase of around 10%. Unfortunately, my salary didn’t increase directly; I received a 10% allowance on top of my salary2.
I took the philosophy of getting people paid correctly, and applied it to how I conducted my training. I taught my users how vital this task was.
This eventually led to me realising that my interests lied more in software training than in payroll itself. I began to understand that by completing this training, the leverage on my knowledge increased.
I wrote about leverage in detail a couple of weeks ago, and about how to increase the impact of your work by having your actions have a larger effect on others. I could help get hundreds or thousands of employees by providing quality teaching to the users completing those tasks.
Finding ways to increase your leverage often takes the form of solving big problems. And when you solve big problems, you can gain value in the form of knowledge, experience, or wealth.
This part of my journey was about maximising knowledge and experience.
By providing training to the end users, my knowledge of the system could be imparted much more efficiently than I could manage the system for them. Learning that I could apply my skills in this way reframed how I approached what I had learnt – I could now teach others those skills in a formal setting, too.
Learning, Teaching, & Learning
Processing pays was very challenging and insightful. But I believe that repeating the same cycle of processing payrolls wasn’t giving me any more relevant experience to progress. Doing more of this would make me a great payroll officer, but I didn’t want to be processing pays forever.
That’s why I took the opportunity to learn something new.
And as with my role as a payroll processor, even the training & quality control began to feel like more of the same.
I didn’t want to continue in the same training role forever, either.
So I started looking for new opportunities.
As part of any search, I kept my LinkedIn profile up to date. This lets recruiters know that you are serious about what you do. Maintaining good relationships with recruiters in your industry helps a lot, too.
I had a good relationship with one such recruiter. Eventually, he reached out to me with two opportunities: a Payroll Officer role, as well as a “Time & Attendance Service Desk” role. The latter was a role dedicated full-time to training, resolving employee queries, and low-level system configuration & user profile changes. Since the system used was the same as what I knew already, he believed that I was a great fit for this role, and convinced me to apply for it.
The interview went extremely well, and I had an offer the next day!
After a short notice period, I finished up at my first employer, enjoyed a 15% pay rise, and got to work at the new job the day after I finished my previous job.
Closing
I want to wrap the story up here for today. The story continues in part two, where I’ll actually cover the part where my salary doubled!
There isn’t much change in the salary in these two years. You’ll have to be patient to see how it escalates from here! (Spoiler – it’s changing companies).
Below are some of the most important things I achieved during the first two years:
- Learned about what work I valued, and why I resonated with it
- Discovered I am capable of rapid learning of new skills
- Engaged in extra-curricular learning to become the best at my role
- Committed myself to taking on new responsibilities
- Made industry contacts that supported me in getting future roles
- Did my best to work harder than or as hard as everyone else
I genuinely believe that if you can achieve some or all of the above in your own career, you will attain positive results in future years. These factors helped me to double my salary, and I believe they’ll help you too.
Thank you for reading.
I very much hope that you enjoyed this piece. If you’d like to read more, check out previous posts on the blog, and follow me on X @ScottOnFire.