Nine percent!

I like that value. 9% is a good thing.

Nine percent is the value of my first of two raises. So I got a promotion and with that comes raises. In my division, we get two raises. The first one in November is your "promotion raise". The second raise in January is your "review raise".

People I know who had recently been promoted told me that they are usually 10% combined, or about 5% for the first and 5% for the second as long as you scored highly on your review, which you had to if you got promoted. This actually really bummed me out because that gave me a rather paltry overall raise because of where I started. I make good money, but not great, I know this for a fact. In the annual ACS (American Chemical Society) salary survey the past few years since I was hired on permanently I was on the low end of what a Ph.D. recent graduate should make (as long as I was NOT working in academia - those poor saps are abused.) ;-)

Compound this insult further by the fact that when I was hired in, I was hired in as a "nuclear physicist", but this was not my background. Therefore HR would not pay me commiserate with my peers, instead offered me a significantly lower salary despite the fact I had worked in the field as a post-doc. My division director came to me apologizing in advance of what HR's offer was. He claims (and I believe him) that he fought for me to be paid more because it doesn't change anything for them or the project. But they wouldn't do it. I was thrilled just to have a permanent position and accepted the very measly raise from my post-doc salary.

So I have been anticipating and dreading finding out what my raises would be. The 10% overall did not put me in a proper compa ratio range of the midpoint 2005 salaries. I was sure this was just one more way I was going to get screwed over.

Count me wrong! At 9% for my first raise, there is no way my overall raise can be 10%. It appears that my dreams were realized and that this promotion should put me at the proper compa ratio. Of course, counting chickens before all have hatched is a bad thing and so I guess I should just shut up now.