Know Your Salary

I learned today that it's important to know your salary, current and future, when applying for jobs. Many companies want to know not only what your current salary is, but also what you want to make if they hire you. This presents a problem for those who know their hourly wage, but not their annual salary. It's also a problem if you'll be fresh out of school and don't know what salary you should be making in a new job. I found a couple resources online to solve both of these problems.

To determine my current annual salary, I used the salary calculator at http://www.grossing.com/Salary-Calculator.htm. It allows you to enter your current hourly wage (perfect for me since I currently do contract work at an hourly wage), and it computes your yearly salary for you. Since I don't work a full 40 hours every week, I used the second calculator on that page which let me enter wage and hours per week.

To determine what I should make in a new position, I used the "Salary Wizard" at www.Salary.com. You put in a job title and zip code, and the site shows you average salaries for the position (or similar positions) in that geographical area. You can drill down even further by entering your level of education to get an even clearer picture of what you should earn.

There are other tools online that perform similar functions, but these two served my purposes after finding them with Google. If you're looking for a job or even asking for a raise, maybe these tools can help you too.