• Hey Guest!
    British Car Forum has been supporting enthusiasts for over 25 years by providing a great place to share our love for British cars. You can support our efforts by upgrading your membership for less than the dues of most car clubs. There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Upgraded members don't see this banner, nor will you see the Google ads that appear on the site.)
Tips
Tips

Wish me luck on Monday!

Share this page

drooartz

drooartz

Moderator
Staff member
Gold
Country flag
Offline
(A bit lengthy, my apologies...)

As some of you know, I work for a school district as a database administrator/programmer. Public institutions here in the US pay on a schedule -- raises flow (or don't) according to a very rigid set of rules. Government also tends to pay less, though there are other benefits that make it a great place to work.

Things get murkier on the IT side, however. IT jobs in industry pay a lot more than many similar government positions, and we tend to loose folks to business after a few years. They come to us, get training and experience, then leave to make 2 - 3 times the wage elsewhere. We're set to start loosing some folks soon at my district.

Our main problem is that our salary schedule doesn't reward any advancement of education/certification/etc, and tops out very low and quickly. Most of our IT folks are topped out after 5 years or so. I've got 5 years in, and am almost done with raises. With 30 years of service necessary for retirement, this means that I'll go almost 25 years with only some small cost of living increases (that don't really keep up). So our group (9 folks) decided to propose something.

We developed a new schedule that rewards IT folks for improving themselves, while at the same time stopping someone who does not put in the effort from getting automatic raises. We've run it by our ultimate boss, the business administrator, and she liked it -- she actually thought that our numbers were too low, so we raised them to suit. The union president likes it as well, and supports what we are trying to do.

Monday morning at 9 am myself (a peon in the group, but a seasoned performer) and our IT manager go into the cabinet meeting -- senior leadership including the superintendent -- to make our presentation. We've spent a week working up the ideas, and I've got quite a few hours of my evening time into the presentation. Don't really know how they'll take it, but it's our best chance to provide real career paths for our IT folks.

Wish me luck! I'm nervous, since I'll be doing most of the speaking for our group and I don't want to let our folks down.
 
good luck!
 
Good luck. I too am up for review next week and always fight for every dime I deserve. Hope it all goes your way.
 
Break a leg, Drew....you're facing down one of the major problems in America's education system - not paying for excellence!
 
Go get em Drew, Good luck! and .... if they won`t listen, maybe it too is time for you to move on. Better money can be had elsewhere, I`d certainly consider it. I have did what Welders typicaly call dragging up {Moving on} several times in my welding tenure and never regreted it once.
I finally made it to the very last drag up, what a relief!
 
Good luck Drew. If my previous employer had been a bit more proactive, I'd likley not be heading to my new job thismorning.
 
Positive vibes are heading your way.

Best wishes!

Tom
 
Thanks, all. I appreciate the good thoughts.

We've voiced our concerns before to individual administrators, and have received good feedback. Now we get to see what happens when we present a fully thought out plan and request some action.
 
GOOD LUCK !!!

Stress the benefits to the company:

- Retaining Top Notch employees and their special knowledge of the work.

- Improves moral by reducing turnover and loss of their best workers.

- Eliminating the low productivity while new employees learn the work well enough to be helpful.


Let us know how it turned out.
 
If Adam Sandler were here, he'd say "You can DO it!" You deserve the recognition just for the initiative to start this in the first place! <hats off to you!>
 
The presentation went very well. Joe (our network manager) and I went through the presentation and explained what we were trying to accomplish. We got questions from the cabinet, but all seemed positive. They liked that we had worked in some merit/education based increases, rather than just simple advancement by years of service. They didn't complain about the numbers we gave them, so I think we hit them right on. We were aiming for a realistic end product, not a high-shot negotiating point, and I think we were right on.

They understand our concerns about career paths and employee retention, and the value of retaining good employees (and weeding out those who don't want to work hard).

We went in very well prepared with as many of the angles thought out as possible -- that helped our case. Basically, it went as well as we could hope for, now we just have to follow through and see how it goes. Our budgets have to be finalized by the end of May, so we'll know in a few weeks.

Thanks again for the supportive comments!
 
Do they have to take it to a Board of Education - elected members from the community who are not school employees - to get the salary schedule changed?

Reason I ask is I had to do a similar thing years ago & ended up making a second presentation to those elected officials when the HR & finance managers made their presentation to change the employee salary schedule....& ran into more problems with other employee groups than with managers & school board officials.
 
I find that preplanning always works best. If you go in there half arsed, you come across sounding well..half arsed. Great to hear Drew.
 
The cabinet puts the budget together, and that is presented to the board by the business admin (who happens to be the boss of the IT group). If the cabinet supports it, it shouldn't have trouble with the board. We may have to go present to the board as well, and we're prepared to do that.

We were aware of the potential of issues with other employee groups, so we've already shown the classified union (representing all non-teaching staff) what we're suggesting. They're behind the plan, which helps a bunch. We're really hoping that our plan could become a model for other subgroups that want some more career-oriented schedules -- our main classified schedule doesn't really help anyone.

It's a great case of everyone (including the board) seeing the issues with the existing schedule, but we were the first group to propose a concrete solution. We've discovered that it's more productive to propose a fully-realized solution than to ask others to do so. A good life lesson for us. :smile:
 
Back
Top