How do you assess the value of an individual job?

How do you assess the value of an individual employee?

What makes you valuable to the job market?

What makes you valuable to a specific company?

How does value correlate to salary? Or does it?

These are all questions that come to mind when hiring an employee or seeking a job. Defining and measuring value and correlating that to a salary are not straight forward in many cases.

So how do you measure value? In my experience there are 3 general components of value that are accretive to the overall value of an employee.

General Market value

This component of employee value is based on your skill set and experience. And what the market thinks of that.

Maybe you  can sysadmin windows, or create and manage  AWS, Azure or Google Cloud instances.

Maybe you can build amazing front ends with Angular or React or write Ruby on Rails apps or pontificate on PHP or architect effective, efficient database schemas.

Maybe you are a SQL savant.

Maybe you are a wizard with Go, or Rust, or Python or Java or Node or whatever other language or framework you love to love.

Maybe you are a big deal in big data.

Or maybe you can shred data analysis with pandas, R, or Tableau like an over caffeinated chef with a ginsu knife shreds cabbage for cole slaw.

There are tons of skill sets. And they all have different market values.

The market value of that skill set is what everybody else (the market) thinks that general skill set is worth.

Think salary surveys and Glassdoor salary data. Think supply and demand.

I have worked for a few Fortune 500 companies in my career and they all had salary tables that were driven by salary surveys of their competitors so that everyone was trying to pay in the same ball park for a given skill set or job title.

The market value of your skill set  is the transactional value of what you bring to the table as the market sees it. This value can vary over time. This value will change with geography.

This value is typically what the bulk of job salary offers are based on. And It is almost exclusively driven by supply and demand.

For example, if you are a .Net expert and 99.4% of companies migrate away from .Net next year then the general market value of that skill set may be greatly reduced. (Ok all my .Net friends calm down, its just an example)

Specific Company value

This component of value builds on your general skill set but is largely derived from your growing specific knowledge of the internals of the company’s systems and processes you work for.

For example, say the company has a proprietary C# web app that drives a portion of their business revenue. Having good general C# knowledge and skills may get you in the door, but the specific internal knowledge and experience you gain with that app, and moving it forward, are what add to this component of your job value. It may be worth more than the market value of the general skill set you have to keep you around.

The more you know about the company’s systems and internal architecture and the better you use that knowledge to provide service, then the higher your specific company value will be.

This component of value is especially pronounced in companies with aging proprietary systems that they still rely on. It is typically not easy or quick to go to the job market and find people to manage and maintain these types of systems.

This component of value is an adder (usually) on top of the market value.

Let’s say that in your geography your given skill set is worth $86,132 US per year. Let’s also say that you have become the go-to expert on a key application the company uses. They may decide that is worth another $22,351 US to keep you around. The extra 25.95% is a monetary risk mitigation on the part of the company. It also may be a type of ‘golden handcuffs‘. This is just a made up example to illustrate the point.  Your mileage and employer situation may vary.

The bottom line is that you can raise your value to the company greatly by being the expert and go-to person for these types of systems.

Company Cultural Value

This component of value has to do with the team, emotional and values fit you are to the company you work for, or trying to work for. The specific dollar value of this component of value is less black and white and more subjective.

Culture is important aspect of team cohesion. More and more employers are assessing culture fit as well as skill fit when they interview and hire. In fact some are even valuing culture fit first and are willing to train skills.

Some companies have gone so far as to institute a “No posterior orifices” rule (think about it).**   This means that companies are specifically looking to weed out applicants ill fitting for culture, values, attitudes or inter-personal skill set.

If you do fit the team, values, attitudes and culture of the company this can also add to your general market value to the company.

That value add may not be a specific dollar amount like the previous example but great cultural and team fit will make you more indispensable. And if layoffs ever  happen this will be considered and all else being equal you may get to stay.

Takeaway

Your value to a given company is based on these components:

1. General skills and acumen – gets you in the door
2. Company specific system knowledge – keeps you in the door
3. Cultural and values fit – keeps you in the door more

In your personal growth strive for incremental, continual improvement in all three areas.

Reading, taking classes, volunteering for new assignments, listening and observing, and improving your EQ are a just a few ways to work on all three.

In the end, it is that disciplined pursuit of personal growth that will always increase your value. And that can correlate to higher salary.

So what determines YOUR value?

** A wise man once told me that profanity was a cover up for a weak vocabulary. For some folks profanity helps them emphasize their point (or emotion). I have chosen an alternative expression to illustrate the same anatomical feature.