Plan a career in IT: goal - £100k PA.

TBH it's kind of hard NOT to earn £100k gross as an fulltime IT contractor, that's about £450/day which is achievable even at small companies and/or outside London.
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:
Agreed I'd expect a CISO to be more like £150k+ these days unless it's in public sector / small company / lower paying industry.

A positive(?) trend I've seen in recent years is that technical leadership is being increasingly rewarded, it used to be that aside from some specialist tech sectors, £100k+ perm roles were nearly all hands-off management / head of / senior programme manager type positions. Now I see lead architect, principal engineer, hands-on head of, delivery lead8 type roles springing up in that bracket. It's actually been a bit of eye-open discussing some senior management roles where I've concluded that my relative lack of recent hands-on technical exposure might be holding me back, whereas in the past I was sometimes viewed as someone perhaps too aligned to IT rather than business / stakeholder management etc!
 
Contracting - Full stack engineers, in London - c£1000 a day. However, as others have said - you need to bring more to the table then just I know this.

Have you thought about a Tech Product Manager role? It might give you a bit of everything?
 
It sounds like my vision when I decided to become a data analyst. My research told me that I could use my technical skills but also travel to lots of places to influence business decisions off the back of the data work. It also told me that making your way up to a head of analytics can get £100k+ a year. It sounded the ideal mix of something I'm good at (technical) and something I'd enjoy (travel) and that my enthusiasm would help me climb the ladder.

The reality is I've ended up in industries I've had zero interest in and my mental health has really suffered as a result. The glass ceiling I've found is that the more senior positions go to industry specialists e.g. I'm a lot more technical than my manager but he has a much better understanding of the business and industry.

What I'm trying to say is pick your industry wisely because it really does matter.
 
Your tech/data skills will be transferrable to other industries though, so there's nothing to stop you switching across and as per my previous post I'm seeing a shift in what companies (in some industries at least) are looking for, tech skills are relatively more sought after than before with industry knowledge being demoted to Desirable instead of Essential.

So now the question is which of these £100k+ jobs would be easiest to blag your way into.

I'd say it's about lining up the right stepping stone to enable that blag. So taking a job in a hot area, do that for 18 months and then blag the £100k job once you can plausibly elaborate on your experience. Obviously the more talented you are the easier it will be to pull off the blag long term at which point one can ask the question, is it really blagging if you are successful?

Contracting is a lot easier to blag because so many more jobs pay the equivalent of £100k gross but also a bit riskier if it turns out you aren't very good. Although even then I've seen mediocre contractors earn good livings just jumping from contract to contract every few months.
 
£100k is actually quite easy, so long as you are working for the right company/sector. The most important thing is doing what you enjoy.

Talent in the UK is shockingly bad, so use this to your advantage. If you are someone who wants to progress, well you are already in the top 10% I'd say.

My friend recently got offered £130k with Microsoft for an infrastructure architect role. He's 10yrs experience working for a quite large MSP. I'm similar, but lazy so on £65k and poor public sector. There are good perks though.

Not sure about the development side, but over here, if you know anything about the cloud and fancy working for a company in London then you are already well on your way to £100k.
 
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It sounds like my vision when I decided to become a data analyst. My research told me that I could use my technical skills but also travel to lots of places to influence business decisions off the back of the data work. It also told me that making your way up to a head of analytics can get £100k+ a year. It sounded the ideal mix of something I'm good at (technical) and something I'd enjoy (travel) and that my enthusiasm would help me climb the ladder.

The reality is I've ended up in industries I've had zero interest in and my mental health has really suffered as a result. The glass ceiling I've found is that the more senior positions go to industry specialists e.g. I'm a lot more technical than my manager but he has a much better understanding of the business and industry.

What I'm trying to say is pick your industry wisely because it really does matter.
In data analysis, your value comes from your ability to interrogate the data to produce useful, actionable information, so yes, domain knowledge is absolutely critical.

To an extent, you can still be effective without it, but it definitely gives you an edge. I'm not a retail expert but I managed to knock up a report that saved a food retailer tens of thousands every month in unnecessary waste....easy to justify remuneration when you're making concrete contributions to the bottom line. It was just a simple heatmap grid report of waste stores vs products, so any products or stores that were underperforming stood out like a sore thumb, easy business action to fix.
 
Are we going to get a 5yrs to 100k thread though? :cry:

The sad thing about that is that not only could he have quite plausibly met the goal well before the target but he'd quite plausibly have exceeded it by a significant amount by now too... could have moved back to Cornwall and worked remotely during the pandemic and would have had the salary to purchase locally too.

But he didn't want to move out and pay a dreaded landlord anything so instead, he lived with his parents and bought a cat...

On the plus side (for anyone who wants to stand out) there are loads of people like that though, simply being keen and ambitious goes a long way as various roles aren't necessarily intellectually demanding (some) developer jobs are pretty basic and BA & PM roles don't really need gigabrain types either - simply having some people skills, being organised and putting in consistent effort and OP should be fine... throw in a bit of ambition and drive too and he'll be doing better than a lot of people who have semi-checked out, don't have any enthusiasm, do enough to get by, don't push for promotions etc..
 
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The sad thing about that is that not only could he have quite plausibly met the goal well before the target but he'd quite plausibly have exceeded it by a significant amount by now too... could have moved back to Cornwall and worked remotely during the pandemic and would have had the salary to purchase locally too.

But he didn't want to move out and pay a dreaded landlord anything so instead, he lived with his parents and bought a cat...

On the plus side (for anyone who wants to stand out) there are loads of people like that though, simply being keen and ambitious goes a long way as various roles aren't necessarily intellectually demanding (some) developer jobs are pretty basic and BA & PM roles don't really need gigabrain types either - simply having some people skills, being organised and putting in consistent effort and OP should be fine... throw in a bit of ambition and drive too and he'll be doing better than a lot of people who have semi-checked out, don't have any enthusiasm, do enough to get by, don't push for promotions etc..
I couldn't agree any more!
 
My salary upon graduating in 2004 (compsci degree) looked something like this :

Year 1 - £16k (perm)
Year 2 - £25k (perm)
Year 3 - £35k (perm)
Year 4 - £45k (perm)
Year 5 - £120k (contracting)
Year 6,7,8 - 80,000 HKD/month (perm)

This was all doing data warehousing/analysis/visualisation. Technical, but you need to understand the business side too.

Then I moved to the games industry and earned considerably less but enjoy my life :D

I think that route, get a few years experience under your belt permie, then go contract, is going to be the easiest and most straightforward way to £100k for most people. I switched jobs 3 times in the first 4 years to get those payrises.
 
£100k is actually quite easy, so long as you are working for the right company/sector. The most important thing is doing what you enjoy.

Talent in the UK is shockingly bad, so use this to your advantage. If you are someone who wants to progress, well you are already in the top 10% I'd say.

My friend recently got offered £130k with Microsoft for an infrastructure architect role. He's 10yrs experience working for a quite large MSP. I'm similar, but lazy so on £65k and poor public sector. There are good perks though.

Not sure about the development side, but over here, if you know anything about the cloud and fancy working for a company in London then you are already well on your way to £100k.
65k plus pension and 50000 days holiday probably is equivalent to 100k private if you work out the hourly rate!
 
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