In my industry there will need to be a bump up in the typical salary bands sooner rather than later, everyone regardless of being a consultancy or client has been really struggling to recruit for a few years now. There’s plenty of scope for these companies to pay more as well, they’re all making record profits. As an example of the room for salaries to grow you’ve got clients who charge the other internal departments £60/hr for a senior’s time or send the work out to consultancies who charge the client more like £40/hr and the actual person doing the work is on between £20 and £25/hr.
Personally I managed to jump ship from consultancy to client based in January and as a senior here I’m paid what a consultancy would pay a principal (one level higher) so the chances of anyone persuading me to leave this role are very low as I’d be taking a similar salary and more responsibility despite jumping ship for a promotion. The only way I move is if the consultancies up their salary bands a decent chunk otherwise it’s not worth the extra stress. I’ve had 12 companies contact me for jobs in the last 6 months and the best offer I had was a £3k salary increase but the requirements of the role would’ve been almost 2 levels above the requirements I have now as well as a 3hr/week longer contract, I’d have to be mad to even consider that.
I think this is a problem in and of itself, the structure of internal salaries, and how certain sections of businesses are being squeezed in order to pay other crucial sections, which is then making promotions and upwards movement unattractive to many, it's happened in our own company. To get good recruits in and to keep skilled specialists their wage has climbed and climbed, whereas mine has stagnated somewhat (though I'm hopeful of a big increase in January, 20% or so).
This means that despite me being responsible for 30 odd staff, there's a good portion of them that just do their own workflows and are on about £2k less than me, despite all my added responsibility of managing them and being answerable to the board. Why on earth any of them would go for my job if I moved I don't know, it would need someone super ambitious who wants to make Director one day.
I got into my business in my mid 20s and have advanced fairly well, maybe not always seen the best reflection of this in salary, which is what I'm going to be pushing during pay reviews. I've literally had my staff say to me they wouldn't go for a promotion to my job for the added hours and pressure for an extra few thousand quid. The solace I take is that I genuinely believe they're going to give me a substantial wage rise in January and I'm in a great position when my Director, who's in her mid 60s, retires.
It's definitely an issue with businesses though that certain levels of mid and upper management will be seen as unattractive because wages below the high earners get squeezed closer and close together.
