Very specific to jobs in the defense industry. Experiences outside defense industry may not have relevance. These jobs are often relatively stable but not the highest paying at senior levels, in general. Contracts are competitively awarded in most cases so companies have pressure to keep rates (cost) and salaries (fixed, cost) down. If you are on a cost type contract some Government clients might expect to see a pyramid type cost structure with few highly paid people. My experience is that it is fairly common for people in your situation to "top out" after about 10 years and accept it; seek employment elsewhere; convert to government employee at GS-13/14/15 rate; or move into company management. Pure technical roles become few and far between. If all of this sounds new to you then I'd suggest talking to your management about the business side of defense contracting. If you are working at a company like Boeing or LMCO that's very different than working for a small business services butt in seat contractor.I know there are lots of engineers and people with other tech-related roles on the forum, so I am interested in the perspective of those with many more years of experience than myself. I am approaching 10 years in the defense industry as an electrical engineer. Over those years I've had around 10 raises, a few from job hops, but most from just your typical yearly "performance" raise, which typically has a COLA percentage baked in as well. Average raise has been around ~7% (I've tracked all my raises), although I've had a few over 10%. I recently got my latest raise with a company I've been with for a few year now and have been very happy with. The raise was 4%; the lowest raise I've ever gotten. This is after back to back years of very strong raises and after undoubtedly my best year from a professional standpoint. I got very strong praises from my managers, so no reason to think that the people in charge of the raises thinks otherwise.
So, to the question in the title of this post: One of the reasons I was given for the small raise was that I am approaching, or maybe even arrived at, the point in my career where salaries begin to stagnate. I know that there is a point in a career where this will happen; it's not sustainable to hand out double-digit raises to people making ~200k+ year after year. However, I am struggling to believe that 10 years in and with a low/mid-100k salary is the point at which the salary increases slow down to low single-digit percentages every year. I understand that large salary increases typically come from promotions or changing jobs, yada-yada. I am not interested in how to increase my salary or anything like that. I am strictly interested in discussion about expected salary progression (not total compensation) here and at what point other engineers (or similar roles/industry) have experienced stagnating raise percentages from a standard yearly raise.
Statistics: Posted by stan1 — Wed Dec 11, 2024 11:25 am — Replies 34 — Views 872