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Been at the same company for 5 years and just found out new hires are making more than me??
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The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
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When graphic design is your passion, and you reach the point that you decide you want to pursue it as a career, you'll also have to accept that you're going to be eating a lot of dirt. Plenty of times in your career, you'll have to swallow your pride along with that dirt, as your skills are undervalued again, and again, and again.
Talent alone isn't enough to carry you forward in this environment. There is a disconnect between creative work and the traditional business mindset. It's just one of those artistic skillsets that the business managers do not understand, because it wasn't explained to them during their MBA, and they can't quite figure out how to exploit the value in the work, so they exploit the artists instead.
And this rears its head in tense discussions of compensation where you're somehow always on the back foot, no matter what your output, as well as with clients who think that your work should take "five minutes." And it's there in that slightly-too-low salary offer, the annual raise that barely matches inflation, and learning that the fresh-faced college graduate new hires have been brought on at higher rates after everything you have done for the company, your proven track record, and all the cumulative, verifiable experience you have.
The more you develop your skills and the more aware you become of them, the more glaring the ever-widening gap between your worth and what you're actually being compensated for becomes.
And this became all-too-clear to this graphic designer who had been working for a company for 5 years strong, fighting tooth and nail to work their way up from $48k a year as a starting rate to $61k through small annual raises. And, yet, when two new hires were brought on board who they were expected to train, they learned that these fresh graduates were making $64k a year, more than them, despite having no experience or seniority. When they raised this with their manager, their manager answered plainly that the market had changed, seemingly offering no other explanation or making any effort to rectify the situation.
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