How can veterans negotiate their civilian salaries?

I’ve been a career counselor for 23 years and currently work with a transitioning veteran organization helping high performing veterans with their post-military plans.

Veterans want to know how to negotiate their civilian salaries, which is a first for almost all of them.  Given that their military salaries are posted publicly I know that they face unique challenges. I’m trying to learn as much as possible to help this population with their specific concerns.

1 reply
  1. Penelope Trunk
    Penelope Trunk says:

    That’s a really interesting problem! There is precedent for this. Big companies based in Silicon Valley have gotten together and codified salaries so that based on anyone’s title you can know the salary. The companies that are really well known for this are:
    Facebook
    Apple
    Amazon
    Netflix
    Google

    Often when people are talking about salary negotiation, they refer to these companies as one conglomerate: FAANG. (Microsoft uses the same system for salaries and I’m sure some others do as well.) You can just search to see how the salaries work. For example, what is an L8 salary at Amazon. What is an L5 salary at Facebook.

    A really good way to understand how people negotiate salary when everyone knows how much they make is by reading Team Blind. It’s a community where all people do is talk about negotiating salary and everyone on there (pretty much) is working at one of the companies that has standardized salaries.

    Penelope

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