Let’s play a game, draw the X and Y axis of a graph. On the horizontal X axis, label it “age.” On the vertical Y axis, label it “total income.” Now, draw a line of what your income path and growth rate would be if you had only a high school diploma. Now draw a line of what your income path and growth rate would be if you had a bachelor’s degree. Draw one for the industry and job title you are now, then draw one for the industry and job title you want to be in next, then one fanciful/dream job. Start drawing it for all the permutations you think you are, could’ve been, or could be.

Do you get something this? (with more lines, but this illustrates the point)

Let’s say you’re in the green line (B) today. It will take you 6 years to make the same annual as someone who is on the purple line (C) and has worked two years. According to the lines above, it takes someone on the blue line (A) to earn as much in a year as someone who works two years in the purple line (C) or seven years in the green line (B).

What’s my point? My point is that for most young (and aggressive) employees, regular, organic growth in your salary is not going to get you to where you want to be. 3-4% raises may keep you on pace or a little ahead of inflation. Waiting for your superiors to recognize your fine work will be effective for a small percentage. The key to increasing your income is to speed up or shift you income. Either demonstrate consistent and solid performance, itemizing out accomplishments and bringing them to the attention of your superiors, or demonstrate the accumulation of valuable skills, degrees, or certifications that can justify significant merit increases. Doing a good job is mandatory, but unfortunately it’s become as much of a discriminator as a college degree (almost required for many jobs and only gets you in the door).

(Incidentally, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be the blue line (A), because the blue line has a better chance of giving you more time with your family, more time with your kids, and more time with your friends than the other three - maybe :))

So, what should you be doing? The solution is to either shift your income path upwards or speed up your growth. What I discuss below isn’t meant to be treated as advice or anything like that, it’s merely my own thoughts on the matter and subject to the specifics of your situation. Please read it with that in mind, it’s designed just to get your brain juices flowing and not designed as an instruction manual.

Shifting Up Your Income Path

The key to shifting up your income path has a lot to do with education. If you don’t have a high school diploma, getting a GED will shift you up. If you have a high school diploma, a college degree will shift you up. If you have a bachelor’s degree, consider a master’s degree (hopefully with tuition reimbursement from your employer!). If you can augment your resume on the education bullets, you can negotiate higher salaries with your current or future employers.

Another key to shifting up your income stream has to do with job responsibilities. Promotions often, but not always, lead to shifts in income to keep your salary competitive with the market rates. If you’re an engineer, a promotion to a team lead should get you a raise above and beyond what you would’ve gotten if you stayed a non-technical lead. If you are promoted to a first line manager or above, you should shift to higher lines. If you aren’t, consider moving to a company that will reward you for taking leadership and management positions.

If you can’t shift (those aren’t the only two ways, but I think you see what I mean), or at least not now, try speeding it up.

Speed Up Your Income Path

A shift up is much harder than simply speeding up your path along the income lines. Whereas a shift up requires degrees or actual responsibilities, you can speed up your income line by simply increasing your value to the organization relative to your peers. If you learn new applicable skills that improve your productivity and show gains for your organization, they should reward you for it. If you don’t use Excel at all in your daily routine, going to an Excel class won’t help. If you do use Excel and can show productivity gains by going to a class, your improved performance, and your documentation of it, should lead to speeding up your income line so you get a little more than the standard raise everyone else is.

The second part, regarding performing better relative to your peers, is just as important as performing better. If you are surrounded by superstars and your department only has a set amount of money to dole out in raises, you might have to work your butt off just to keep up (it could explain why you may have a few bad raises!). If you are surrounded by a department of fools, it’ll be far easier for you to shine so you better take advantage of it. If you need ideas, it doesn’t hurt to ask around.

Build A Case

One crucial point that is applicable to both ideas is communication with your management and company leadership. I know a lot of people who, upon attaining master’s degrees, weren’t properly compensated for their efforts after the degree was awarded. Part of that was institutional (the company simply didn’t see why they should, so people went to other more enlightened firms) but part of it was communication. You have to build a case for yourself before anyone else will. Your manager has a job to do too and it’s not priority number one to ensure you get what you deserve… that’s your priority number one. So remember to build a case for yourself, don’t just assume people will recognize what you’ve done and compensate you for it.

Nearly two years ago my then beautiful girlfriend, now my gorgeous wife, quit her job and moved to Maryland. Over the next month, she faced an adversity some are now facing, the seemingly endless futility of searching for a new job. She was jobless for quite a while, sending out dozens of resumes and cover letters a day, and falling deeper into the pit of futility with each passing day. While she didn’t feel actual financial pain, she was feeling the pressure of not earning money but still spending it, on rent, groceries, etc. It was that pressure and her ingenuity that resulted in these three morale boosting tips we discussed over dinner the other night.

The key behind each of these tips is that they’re designed with a single aim in mind: boosting your morale. Sometimes it’ll feel like finding a job is a numbers game, where you send out hundreds of resumes in return for a handful of callbacks and an even fewer number of actual interviews. That’s because it is a numbers game and it is just as important to keep your chin up as it is to keep sending out your resume.

Aside: On Being Fired

Let me briefly tackle an aside for a moment. If you were let go from a company, don’t feel bad. Despite what the numbers may indicate or what the pundits may say, we’re in an economic slowdown that has companies letting people go. If you were fired in a time of prosperity, perhaps you might feel bad about yourself. However, given the economic climate today, it’s just as likely mismanagement on the part of your company (in planning, projecting, etc) has as much to do with your departure as you do. Either way, being fired is not the worst thing in the world and to think that is counter-productive. Perhaps this is the opportunity you’ve always wanted, a chance to look inside yourself and figure out what it is you actually want to do. Don’t squander it by going down a dead-end path for the sake of money.

Onto the three morale-boosting tips…

Track Your Progress

The first step in her job search was to build a spreadsheet of all the companies she was interested in. The next step was the track what she did with each of those companies, whether it’s calling them up, visiting their offices, or sending a cover letter and resume. This lets you accurately track your progress and builds structure into your work.You have zero control over whether the company responds but you have control over your level of effort. You alone control how many resumes, cover letters, and emails you send out. If you don’t track your own progress, all you’ll focus on is the fact that no one has responded and it will disenchant you.

Hand in hand with tracking your progress is setting achievable goals for yourself such as number of resumes sent, or number of companies contacted, or number of companies identified to contact in the future. You have to feel success in the things you can control, effort, because you can’t control anything else.

Do Something Else

You can only job search for so long before you start feeling burned out, so do something else. If you have a choice, pick up something that gives you a sense of accomplishment or improves your skills. If you’re a software developer, perhaps you can use this time to brush up on your programming skills by building side projects. If the prospect of something that close to your real work is discouraging, pick up an entirely different hobby like gardening or running.

What you want to do is get that feeling of accomplishment and success because it’ll give you a strong moral boost. You want to be able to look back on your day and say: “I sent out five resumes and I planted a bed of roses, that’s a pretty good day.” or “I set up my company tracking spreadsheet, hit the gym for an hour, and cooked up a nice little dinner.” Honestly, those two examples are probably more productive than most people are in 8 hours at work.

Read What Color Is Your Parachute

I haven’t personally read this book but my wife said it was great when she was looking for a job. What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Bolles has been lauded in many places and I would take a trip to the library to check it out. My wife said that the most poignant part of the book, for her, was the section that explained how this should be an exciting time in your life. It’s one of the few times that you can honestly give yourself an assessment and decide what you really want to do with your life.

If you left or were laid off from a job in the financial services industry, now is a great chance for your see if you want to try something else entirely. Maybe you went into a career for the money but not because you loved it, now is your chance to try something you truly enjoy. I’m sure there is more to the book than that concept but that’s certainly a good point.

This is a guest post by Anna Ivey, more on her at the end of this article.

The working world is a completely different beast from the college world, and the transition can be a bumpy one. There’s been a lot of talk about how Gen Yers demand meaningful responsibility on the job, and I’m all in favor of internships and starter jobs that offer opportunities for challenge and increased responsibility. However, you have to earn those things, and prove you can handle them.

I’ve also noticed a fundamental lack of respect by many twenty-somethings for the people they work for. That lack of respect can manifest itself in something as small as addressing an email or consistently refusing to follow — or even acknowledge — instructions. (And even if your boss is a drooling idiot, it’s in your interest not to reveal your contempt.)

The following eight tips might seem completely obvious to some people, but I’ve seen this behavior often enough that I’ll list the most common issues here, as simply and bluntly as I can.

1. Respect the English language.

If you can’t be bothered to spell properly when you’re writing to your boss or a customer, what does that say about you? We all fall victim to typos, and there are certainly different standards for text messages or wiki postings (or blog postings!) and more formal kinds of communications. But… ignoring the “shift” key altogether, when you’re writing to someone you’re supposed to impress? Not good. Same goes for proper grammar and precise vocabulary. Language is power. Don’t believe me? Read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language (”the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”).

2. Banish “hey.”

Banish “hey” from your written communications (and spoken communications, for that matter).

Your colleagues are not your BFF’s (”hey dwight”), or even your MySpace/Facebook friends. They might turn into friends, but don’t impose that casual familiarity unless and until the relationship warrants it. Posting a message on someone’s Facebook wall and writing an email to your boss are two completely different things. (I remember calling someone a few years back to offer him a job, and thinking how badly I wanted to retract the offer when he told me how “stoked” he was. Argh.)

3. Follow directions, and don’t make your boss ask twice.

If your boss asks you to put the customer name in a header for all of your project documents, don’t send him a document without the customer name in the header. Simple, right? And if your boss has to remind you, don’t make him remind you again.

4. Don’t ask for clarification of perfectly unambiguous instructions.

If you’re asked to get the TPS reports on your boss’s desk by the afternoon, don’t ask him, “When do I need to get you those reports?” Or if you’re asked to restrict your report to 5 pages, don’t send him an email asking, “Is that a hard limit?” Your boss’s time has value, and stupid questions tend to waste his time. (Contrary to the brainwashing you’ve received in school, there is such a thing as a stupid question.)

5. Just OK is not enough.

Every day that you show up at work is another day you need to justify your employment. If you’re not doing your best, why should they keep you? Your job is not pass/fail, and the job interview never really ends. Don’t wait until your first performance review to shape up.

6. Tell your parents to butt out.

Don’t ever — EVER — let your parents contact your employers. If you want to be respected as a mature, independent professional, act like one and leave mommy and daddy out of it. Expecting your employers to deal with your parents is beyond lame. They hired you — not your parents — and it’s not a package deal.

7. Get used to grunt work.

I don’t care how smart or “entrepreneurial” you are, or how impressed you are with yourself, or how great your parents think you are. When you’re starting out in the working world, you’re going to do a lot of grunt work. It’s the only way to learn the ropes, and nobody is above it. Nobody. If you think you deserve to be entrusted with matters of importance in a starter job, you have delusions of grandeur. Plus, true entrepreneurial types do plenty of grunt work, and they don’t complain about it, because they know it needs to get done if the overall project or venture is going to succeed.

8. Understand your role.

As long as you’re reporting to someone, understand that your job is to make her life easier, not the other way around.

Anna Ivey, a recovering lawyer, decided the fates of thousands of applicants as former dean of admissions at a top-ten law school and now works with high school students and twenty-somethings to help them make smart choices in school, at work, and in life. Anna has appeared on CNN and Fox News Channel, and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Business Journal, Fortune.com, Smart Money, and Marie Claire. Anna speaks at colleges around the country and publishes The Ivey Files, a blog for twenty-somethings, the parents who love them, and the bosses who manage them. Learn more about Anna at www.annaivey.com.

At least that’s according to the statistics, discussed on CNNMoney today, which show that the average CEO is paid $10.8 million versus the average employee being paid $29,544. In 2005, that multiple was 411x and in 2000 it was a staggering 525x. There are caveats to those numbers because the groups that did the studies did some strange math, strange as in I wouldn’t have done it this way, such as include in the average employee salary both part time and full time employees (uhhh… clearly doesn’t make sense to me). CNN Money estimated that if you took out part timers and considered non-managers, you’re talking about $40,000 a year and a multiple of only 270x - which isn’t that ridiculous I suppose.

My current company is privately held so I have no way of figuring out what the multiple is personally but at my last company, the CEO’s total compensation about 307x more than what mine (according to Reuters) was that same year… what was your multiple?

It’s been over a month since the last Devil’s Advocate post and people have been asking whether the series was dead, well it’s not! This time I take on an issue that’s particularly poignant with my group of friends since many of us have left our original employer, where we all met, and gone on to greener pastures. I know in the past I’ve written about how you should date other jobs but this time I want to take it from the other side, how you should stick with the same job for the rest of your life because there are benefits to being loyal.

Loyalty is a Virtue

Let’s be honest, if you were an employer, would you rather hire someone who you know will stick around for a while or someone who jump at the next opportunity somewhere else? Naturally you prefer the loyal employee because you can depend on them sticking around and because it’s hard to make future plans if you have to depend on someone who might be easily enticed to leave with more money.

Earning Respect

As you move from job to job, you might find yourself making a promotional move, one where your new job is higher in the hierarchal chain, and in charge of a group of other employees. It’s much harder to earn people’s respect if you come in from the outside than if you move up from within and that’s something that a lot of people have difficulty grasping. Granted, you’ll get some respect along with your newly minted title and there are always political issues if you are promoted before someone else, but in general earning respect is easier if you’ve been there for a while and fighting in the trenches.

Learning the System

One of the hardest parts about taking a new job is learning how things work at the new company, do you really want to have to learn how to navigate human resources or how salaries are determined? Do you really want to deal with a new set of office politics and who hates who? Probably not and by sticking around with one company, you avoid having to relearn all those mundane issues at a new company. When I left my last company, one of the biggest pains was trying to decipher my benefits all over again and learn new terminology.

It’s Not Always About Money

If you had the skills, you probably could be an investment banker on Wall Street making six figure bonuses instead of doing whatever it is you’re doing right now… except you would be working 12-18 hour days and killing yourself. For some people, that’s what they want to be doing; for others, the quality of life aspect comes into play and they value things other than money. If you have skills that in demand, you could probably go to another company and earn more money but you sacrifice a lot of the things you’ve built up at your current company. Your network of friends and associates, your reputation, your understanding of how the company works, and your general level of comfort.

Ultimately whether or not you want to move from company to company depends a lot on the specific factors but a lot of folks seem to push forth the idea that moving to another company is almost always a winning proposition. Certainly it’s likely always a winning proposition financially, otherwise you wouldn’t even consider it, but as you get older there are other non-financial factors that may dominate the decision. I just wanted to throw a few of those out there so that they get the juices flowing and it’s not seen as just a strict money decision.

Back in April, CNN reported the year over year jumps in salaries for certain degree holders, declaring marketing majors the clear winner from a year over year perspective. The overall winners of the best paid degree list were still chemical engineers, over $5,000 a year past the 2nd place winner electrical engineers. So, CNN, a scant three months later, has yet another report out and yet again chemical engineers own the top spot. The report is based on a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which did the survey the last time around.

So what can we learn from this list? It pays to be an engineer! The top six degrees are engineering degrees (you can argue computer science doesn’t have the word engineer in it but it’s engineering) and every single classic engineering discipline is represented. Chemical ranks as top dog with a salary of $59,361 and sixth place Civil clocks in with a very respectable $48,509 a year salary. Each saw increases that outpaced inflation, which is a great sign.

The balance of the list has a healthy mix of fine or liberal arts and business/economics related degrees… so everyone is feeling the prosperity. It’s just that engineers are feeling more of it. One interesting statistic I’d like to see coupled with this increase is the number of actual hires in these fields, that would give the numbers some context. The survey did glean that competition was up but that doesn’t explain whether demand was up or supply was up or perhaps both and supply merely outpaced demand.

In the past there has been great debate as to why personal finance bloggers are so willing to share their net worths but aren’t so forthcoming with their salaries - I was one of them (until recently, now I don’t share either, ha!). It’s been talked about on other blogs as well but I wanted to put forth my theory as to why it doesn’t bother us to learn Tiger Woods’ or Bill Gates’ or the President’s salary and it’s not terribly outlandish (and you’ve probably heard it before).

People keep their salaries private because they use it to compare how successful they are against others. If you make $30,000 now and your friend is making $35,000, then you feel bad (if you think you don’t feel bad, please be honest with yourself; if you still don’t feel bad, I applaud you because you are likely in the minority). Why is the other guy making $5k more than you? Why are you paid less? Why is he or she paid more? Am I a jerk for even thinking this? The answer is there is no answer, there are plenty of reasons why the other person is making more (or less) and it likely has nothing to do with you or his or her ability. Oh, and you’re not a jerk, it’s natural to compare anything. The other person might be paid more because they started at a time when the competition was hot; the other person might be paid more because they’re doing a slightly different job; the other person might be paid more because they honestly are better than you or harder working and you just don’t know it. Ultimately, there are plenty of reasons and a majority have nothing to do with you… but it’s hard to accept that. That’s why you don’t share salaries. You don’t want other people to feel bad and you don’t want to feel bad yourself; it’s okay.

So why doesn’t it bother you to find out how much Tiger Woods makes? You can’t compare to Tiger Woods unless you’re Phil Mickelson or VJ Singh, you’re probably neither (if you are, shoot me an email!). You don’t compare yourself to Donald Trump, you don’t compare yourself to Martha Stewart, and you don’t compare yourself to Steve Jobs - that’s why it doesn’t matter if you know how much they bank each month.

Oh, Steve Jobs makes a dollar each year… you probably make more and I think he’s okay with that.