Plan a career in IT: goal - £100k PA.

Freefaller said:
Your effective tax is 60% after you go over 100k - https://www.nutmeg.com/nuggets/escape-the-60-tax-trap

That's why high pension contributions and salary sacrifices are often recommended - especially if you want to receive your tax free child care and 30hrs free child care.

Many people who don't understand would say "you earn over 100k why do you need childcare support?" - they don't realise that it's based on individuals not joint income. So if you 2 of you in the household earn 95k each, you're entitled to full child care relief/credits/child care etc... and you don't even get stung by the 60% tax trap. So as a household you're earning £190k and get full benefit of it all.

If 1 of you earns 101k and the other earns nothing - you get nothing other than 15hrs childcare. That's it. However as a household you're earning 90k less. How ****** up is that?

And 100k whilst it sounds a lot, if it's your sole income it doesn't magically make you well off depending on your situation. For an average family of 4, with a mortgage, car, etc... that 100k doesn't leave you with much per month - you're not suddenly going to be driving around in Ferraris and travelling first class everywhere. Admittedly, it does mean that you're likely to be okay (and be able to ride the current wave of cost of living) but it's not as if you're suddenly loaded.



He was right. RIP.
Click to expand...

This is why I would only change career if there is a good chance of starting a business within the field. My current field of pharmacy is very limited in terms of business. Everyone says why don't you open up a pharmacy/chemist but the Government has restricted the opening of new premises. You have to buy an existing one and I've had a look and I need around £150k just for the deposit.... Many owners and ex-owners that have now retired have told me to steer clear which is a shame:(

I have spent many evenings with my close friend who is also a pharmacist trying to come up with ideas to do with pharmacy/healthcare or even something tangential but we've come up with very little so far. Perhaps creativity is not my strong suit?
 
flibbage0 said:
This is why I would only change career if there is a good chance of starting a business within the field. My current field of pharmacy is very limited in terms of business. Everyone says why don't you open up a pharmacy/chemist but the Government has restricted the opening of new premises. You have to buy an existing one and I've had a look and I need around £150k just for the deposit.... Many owners and ex-owners that have now retired have told me to steer clear which is a shame:(

I have spent many evenings with my close friend who is also a pharmacist trying to come up with ideas to do with pharmacy/healthcare or even something tangential but we've come up with very little so far. Perhaps creativity is not my strong suit?
Click to expand...

Having creativity is great. Its finding ways not get bent over by the government when you start your own business.
 
Housey said:
A senior enterprise sales person (Account Executive/Director) will typically have support sales people working alongside them. They love to tag themselves as the same but they are usually not. [...]

LinkedIn is full of people with big titles who in fact are junior sales people or middle ground sales people in those roles seeking to up their profile and attract their next employer.
Click to expand...

Yeah, titles certainly do vary, "Account Executive" IME is not a senior salesperson but just a grad or someone with just a few years of experience role in account management, they'd help manage some of the clients belonging to an Account Manager or Account Director but they don't (yet) own any clients themselves (that comes when they get promoted to account manager). Also in some places, the people with *any* of those titles would only deal with existing clients, sales is part of their role (upgrades/customisations, consultancy services etc..) but so is client retention and flagging up potential issues with the relationship, getting certain things pushed as a priority within development/engineering. A completely separate team could deal with potential new clients with sales directors + pre-sales consultants etc. and have nothing further to do with those clients once the deal has been signed.

RobHu said:
I think the hardest part will unsurprisingly be convincing a company to give you a chance at a junior role without experience or background in the industry.
Click to expand...

Yup, as much as even quite basic developer (or indeed even application support*) roles in say finance can pay very well OP probably is probably going to need to look at smaller companies for a first developer job.

*Knowledge of and experience working with some of the financial software used by big banks can lead to lucrative contracting gigs, not because this stuff is inherently complicated and requires geniuses to support but rather because it's badly documented and there's a rather limited number of people who have the required experience, unlike say more commonly used technology you can't necessarily go and get certified or buy a few books etc.. the only way to learn is to have built up experience working with the stuff.
 
Diddums said:
..... I suspect I'll be on £100k in my current line of work in a few years anyway, so this would be more of a quality of life move than a financial one.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

What is your current line of work? You'd have to really want to get into something else to throw away your existing experience and momentum and what you know elsewhere, which is about to net you 100k anyway surely?

100K IT jobs... A lot of them will be less technical though, involving lead roles, managing others etc. I've done a lead role and disliked it. I went from actually delivering stuff and doing technical things, to living my working life in meetings, managing work loads and people and it was dull, stressful and I felt like I never actually did anything.
 
dowie said:
Yeah, titles certainly do vary, "Account Executive" IME is not a senior salesperson but just a grad or someone with just a few years of experience role in account management, they'd help manage some of the clients belonging to an Account Manager or Account Director but they don't (yet) own any clients themselves (that comes when they get promoted to account manager). Also in some places, the people with *any* of those titles would only deal with existing clients, sales is part of their role (upgrades/customisations, consultancy services etc..) but so is client retention and flagging up potential issues with the relationship, getting certain things pushed as a priority within development/engineering. A completely separate team could deal with potential new clients with sales directors + pre-sales consultants etc. and have nothing further to do with those clients once the deal has been signed.
Click to expand...
In most big tech companies it is AE these days. The Strategic AE's / Global AE's tend to run the single customer relationships with global organisations, but most Tech companies have teams of AE's at many different levels, so you can have juniors and seasoned big hitters all called AE at very different stages of their career.

Most tend to now front 'AE' with their market, eg SMB, Commercial, Mid Market, Enterprise. You tend to move up to bigger markets these days, not really a thing to move from AE to AM in any business I've worked for in the last 20 years and most roles will be hybrid (some new business, some customers). I don't like the use of Sales Director for IC roles. Director should be for leaders with reports, but that's a personal thing.

You really can't make any judgement on a persons seniority in IT sales based on their job title as it's become a poor measure of experience and earnings.
 
Last edited:
Housey said:
I don't like the use of Sales Director for IC roles. Director should be for leaders with reports, but that's a personal thing.
Click to expand...

It isn't an IC role in the sort of case I'm referring to, granted they're not managing a huge headcount either (they'll have a secretary, some sales admin people and the pre-sales consultants who are part of their team) but they do borrow additional staff from other departments (Product managers and consultants who might be better specialists to use for some part of the system the pre-sales people in the team aren't as familiar with) and need some seniority.

They've got a surprising amount of leeway in the sort of costs they're allowed to run up too, though in one case I've seen an entire team get sacked (save for the secretary and admin bod) after the sales guy burned through about a million or so in flights, hotels etc.. and lost revenue while chasing a lead he had no hope of closing.
 
Seen plenty of occasions where IC people are graded higher than their direct manager who has decided to go down that route while the IC has no desire to be a people manager. Plenty of Sales Directors on the biggest accounts who do hold director level IC grades
 
These days you can progress a lot faster in IT. I see plenty of people late 20s/early 30s hitting six figures, the sort of progression that used to get 5 years is now done in 2 (e.g. they are in "Senior" roles after 18-24 months and then move on to "Lead"/"Principal"/"Head of" or similar in another couple of years).

I look at the people in their 20s earning £60-80k these days and think the equivalent role and person would've been on half that 10 years ago.
 
I work as a recruiter in the IT area - specifically within contracting. I would say its pretty easy to get to 100k and you could probably do it in 4 years with the right experience.
From where I sit at the moment, that would be a DevOps Engineer, with experience coding in GoLang or Python or alternatively a React developer (javascript) - There are lots of low hanging fruit roles that I struggle to find candidates for that pay around £500-550 per day (inside ir35) that would earn you the equivalent of £100k.

I have placed candidates into roles paying £650/day with just 3 years experience but roles at £500-550 are more realistic.
 
XeNoN89 said:
Plenty of security roles can get that high, but breaching that 100k barrier will probably mean you're pushing towards something like a CISO role
Click to expand...

Getting to a senior level in a more 'regular' role would net you that in security without needing to push for C level, if you're on the architecture/engineering side you can get to that without too much hassle.

As always depends on the company/industry, some places a third line SOC analyst could be getting near that as a specialist, whereas somewhere public sector could be paying 40odd for a deputy CISO :cry:
 
Last edited:
sigma said:
In your case @Diddums I'd be looking at your transferable skills. Coding is something you can build more experience with on the side whilst gaining some industry experience at the same time. Therefore, two roles spring to mind:

Business Analyst (essentially being the interface between users and projects, gathering and documenting requirements - needs nous and good people skills)
Project Manager (managing projects ;) including managing the Business Analysts but much more - core skills: people skills, management, spotting stuff ahead of time, getting buy-in etc, look up the rest) - Scrum master is a specific role you may want to look into, concerned with Agile projects.

I'd say go for the PM role, you already manage people right? High pressure work? You manage projects? All transferable skills. PM more likely to earn £100k but BA could be a good stepping stone to PM -BAs always seem to be in demand and still pay reasonable. PM roles lead to Programme Management roles, so you can earn £1000s a day claiming all the wins as your efforts but the losses as the PM's fault :)

Regarding £100k, it'd be interesting to hear about people's experiences, especially:

@Django x2 who once said he couldn't afford to live on £100k so is presumably well north

@kindai earns more than £100 an hour

@ChrisD. suggests contracting (highly paid) isn't as lucrative so is presumably on good £££

@Screeeech I seem to recall is a pretty senior dev/architect?

Edit, anyone work in IT sales? @Housey?
Click to expand...
Yep, £466k this year pre tax :(

Hell, a semi mediocre consultant role at Microsoft will see you on £150k
 
Last edited:
sHo0sH said:
I work as a recruiter in the IT area - specifically within contracting. I would say its pretty easy to get to 100k and you could probably do it in 4 years with the right experience.
From where I sit at the moment, that would be a DevOps Engineer, with experience coding in GoLang or Python or alternatively a React developer (javascript) - There are lots of low hanging fruit roles that I struggle to find candidates for that pay around £500-550 per day (inside ir35) that would earn you the equivalent of £100k.

I have placed candidates into roles paying £650/day with just 3 years experience but roles at £500-550 are more realistic.
Click to expand...
Precisely and correct for me too initially. I have about 3yrs IT experience but moved up through the ranks pretty quickly. Then went contract.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom