I am effectively being promoted to the first engineering position at my company; how much should I ask for?

Question

I live in a major city in Florida and I was hired as an IT support specialist 18 months ago. The senior support who was there when I started left for a job more suited to his needs, and I took over a lot of his responsibilities including implementing our new phone system. That said, I have a lot of experience programming in my spare time, so I was able to refactor his code down to less than a quarter of its original size as well as make some improvements and patch things that weren't working correctly. Since then (and after some strife), I've been promoted to senior IT support, and my duties now primarily consist of working on our contact center (including regularly programming updates - sometimes in a live contact center - to meet new business needs).

More recently, I've taken on and excelled at the task of creating some information retrieval automation with TTS by integrating our CRM's REST API (during which process I was able to highlight bugs and inconsistencies in the API to its developers ultimately leading to them updating and changing aspects of their system). Going forward, I will likely be using 2 more APIs to further update and enhance our system to automate more tasks in the backend and improve worker productivity.

With that in mind, I'd written my original proposal to be a promotion to $65k i.e. a 25% raise based on a year of the company not having to pay another systems engineer for the work I've done. This was based on my not having any (other) full time professional experience as an engineer in an enterprise environment, the existing IT budget, and my not being able to find any API integration development jobs that paid less than $70k.

That said, it occurred to me that I was only looking for compensation based on the work I've already done, not what work I'll be expected to complete. Right out of the door, I know they're interested in having a chatbot as a preliminary response to getting in contact with an agent, and the CRM info retrieval system is going to need an update to allow payments. Knowing all of this, how much would be fair for me to ask for?

TL;DR: I'm going from Senior IT Support at $48k ($50k+ with how regularly I work overtime) to the first and only Systems Engineer (or IT Support Engineer, still working this out) in my company with my primary responsibility being designing and developing our contact center (phones and chats including a chat bot in the relatively near future). How much should I ask for?

Answer 1

If your title is being changed to Systems Engineer or IT Support Engineer then do a market analysis for your geographic area for those positions for a person of your experience level. Find out what the minimum, median, and maximum salary range is and then ask for something along those lines.

From what you've described, a salary of $55K to $65K seems about right to me.

Answer 2

There are multiple factors that influence what salary and title you're able to get. In addition to past performance, skill level, and the market value of the role, there are considerations related to how large a raise can be for an internal candidate. Many orgs are reluctant to give large salary increases and promotions to people who are already working there. These promotions often create problems for HR because others may feel they're entitled to a similar raise/promotion as you (even if they're working in a completely different department). Ironically, the employer might have no problem giving that same high salary and title when accepting an external candidate.

That said, given the description of the role, the target salary level you're asking (65K) seems very modest, but a raise of ~35% may be considered high for a cost-center role. The best thing you can do is to summarize your research findings about the market value of the role and negotiate something you can live with.

Keep in mind that if you're "the only one" with that job title, the org might not have experience with people who do that job. They might not have an understanding of your value. But if you have to accept a raise that is smaller than you expect, you may also negotiate benefits other than salary. For example, you may ask the employer to pay for your training/certifications, or authorize you to introduce new technology initiatives. This allows you to at least gain more benefit from your job as a stepping stone to something better in the future.