10 Years in IT

Mitechniq

I officially have 10 years in IT and I did some number crunching on an excel sheet to see how my progress throughout the years have been.

First 4 Years I was with one company, got promoted and I netted a salary increase of 19.64% from Year 1 to Year 4.
During that time I received my Bachelors Degree from WGU and several certifications to include my CISSP. I was able to move to a new position which was a 33.34% increase in salary.
The next 3 1/2 Years I stayed with my second company, I also got promoted but I only had an increase of 12.82% from Year 4 to Year 7 1/2.
During that time I received my Masters from WGU and I passed several Professional certifications most importantly my AWS Solution Architect Pro cert.
The last 2 1/2 years I have been employed by three different companies and netted a salary increase of 90.91% overall not to include an annual bonus.

This is my own personal testimony, so take it with a grain of salt. I wish the days of staying with one company was salary advantageous but I have only seen maximum return on employment when I decide to hop to another company. They all had the same type of benefits if you want to take that into account.

olaHalo

Can confirm. I have less than 5 years experience and have gone from 9 bucks an hour to over 120k so far. Achieved by job hopping and resume padding with degrees and certs.

dave330i

Congrats on 10 years. I'm getting close to my 7th year. There are companies that value talented, hard workers, but they're very few.

DatabaseHead

Job hopping is the only way to get those type of returns......

@ OP congrats

scaredoftests

I am going on 20 years.

jamesleecoleman

Thats awesome!

I hit my 3rd year a couple months ago. I also feel like changing employers is the only way to increase salary. I got a 11,000 dollar increase by coming into this job. It should have been 20,000 if I was getting paid what the last person was. I would have for sure asked for more if I knew what was going to happen before I got here.

scaredoftests

I got a $6000 raise from what I was making in January. Also, to an offer about a month ago to raise my salary $4000 more, but decided to stay put for awhile here. Learning a lot where I am, plus my boss and co-workers are awesome. Commute is meh.

DatabaseHead

I guess I can't claim to be in IT anymore since I went to the dark side of BI.

NetworkNewb

Yea, its crazy. Granted I've only been IT for about 5-6 years but I have never hit the 2 year mark at any company. I actually really want to, its not that I haven't liked the places I've worked. There just never seems to be good opportunities to grow. The last job told me they would promote me and hire someone under me, but after 8 months of hearing it I left (was there for almost 2 years). The current job has told me they are trying to create a new position engineer for me, but if it doesn't happen soon... We'll see. I wouldn't hold my breath of relying on companies to help me move up.

scaredoftests

I hit 2 years with my previous company, (that hasn't happened since 2013, since then, contracts ended or were amended etc) but then after 2.5 years, the president of the company decided to take all the money and fled the country. Jeez, I could write a book.

jamesleecoleman

I've hit two year marks twice. First job ever, I got laid off and the second time, I was going to get laid off so I got a different job. I'm going to do my best to do atleast 3 years where I'm at. Shoot, I'm working on getting the experience for the CRISC and CISSP.

alias454

I went from 15 an hour to 38 an hour at one company HD=>SysAdmin=>Senior SysAdmin=> Senior Unix Admin. Now I transitioned to a new company doing security so pay didn't go up since making the transition has been hell getting a break but a lot of other benies got mixed in. I have a good title and lots of opportunity for growth. I expect to hit the 100k+ mark next year sometime.