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Negotiating Your Salary And Position

Up to Negotiation Skills


After the Offer, Before the Deal: Negotiating A First Academic Job
By Chris M. Golde, Academe, January-February 1999. "What is a fair salary? Can I ask for moving expenses? When can faculty members negotiate reductions in their teaching loads? These are the kinds of questions graduate faculty often hear from their students who have just been offered academic jobs. Besides training young scholars as teachers and researchers, we also mentor them in their search for jobs. As a result, we're expected to know the answers to such questions. In this article, I offer suggestions to the just-appointed faculty member who seeks to be a savvy participant in negotiating the terms of a first job."
Academic Scientists at Work: Negotiating a Faculty Position
ScienceCareers.org "Negotiating a job is similar to playing a hand of poker: the stronger your hand - your credentials - the more you can demand. The trick is to know what aspects of the position are negotiable and what the limits are; otherwise, you may find that the offer has folded. This article will discuss the issues at stake in academic science research positions and offer some suggestions on how you could approach your own negotiations so that you get the job you want and the start-up package you need."
Negotiating Offers for Faculty Positions
A guide from the UNC Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.
The Noel Smith-Wenkle Salary Negotiation Method
"Salary negotiation is something at which hiring managers are usually a lot more proficient than the people they hire. In the interest of leveling the playing field, here is a method for salary negotiation that has worked for me and many others."
Negotiating: Please Sir, Can I Have Some More?
ScienceCareers.org "Whether you're a fresh Ph.D. searching for a lab in which to do a postdoc, or you're trying to land a junior faculty position and create your own lab, negotiations are crucial in developing your scientific career. Reaching satisfying compromises with the head of a lab or the department chair requires first-rate communication and social skills. Professional bargaining, for example, could win you promises of more start-up funds, additional space, or extra equipment. At the postdoctoral level, good negotiating may mean you wind up taking away part (or all!) of your project when it's time to leave. But negotiating doesn't start and end at interviews: Interacting with an employer, department chair, or lab director takes place throughout your research career."
Negotiating Your First Academic Job Offer
by Margaret L. Newhouse. "Many first-time academic job candidates assume that, once they receive a job offer, their arduous search is over. In fact, no matter how delighted you are with an offer, it is wise to view it as part of the last stage of the process -- the negotiation stage -- even if you ultimately decide not to negotiate anything. This pamphlet offers some general principles and advice on negotiating academic job offers, particularly initial ones."
Nine Key Negotiating Points
"Laurie Weingart, a negotiations expert and behavioral analyst, provides advice on nine issues that should be addressed when negotiating a junior faculty position."
Women and Minorities Negotiating Salaries
"The objective of this article is to heighten awareness for women and minorities about the effect of starting salary on career earnings and the materials available for assessing your potential employer. The bottom line is that a low starting salary will haunt you throughout your academic career."
Negotiation Skills for Women in Science
"Economist Linda Babcock performed a comprehensive study of the starting salaries of students graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with master's degrees (2003). She found that students who had negotiated (most of them men) were able to increase their starting salaries by an average of 7.4% or $4,053 - almost the exact difference she found between men's and women's average starting pay. Through a series of similar experiments, Babcock found that in general, women tend to be less likely to initiate negotiations, more apprehensive about negotiating, and more pessimistic about their own worth."