In popular professions, six-figure salaries are likely to become the standard for large employers soon.
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How about 30, 40 or 50 percent more salary? Well, such increases in income could become a reality in the future. All you have to do is wait. And you should also have the right job.
Three factors play into the hands of qualified employees in the long term: the shortage of skilled workers, increasing academic training and – no argument for advocates of the performance principle, but reality – inflation. Together, they form a kind of perfect job market storm that is expected to significantly inflate knowledge worker salaries by the end of the decade.
The reasons for this are simple mathematics: According to the Bitkom industry association, 96,000 positions in IT were recently vacant. By 2030, 1.1 million full-time employees could be missing in this area, as an analysis by the Boston Consulting Group recently calculated. This improves the negotiating position in every annual meeting.
Salary experts are already reporting increases in income of up to 30,000 euros in fields such as data engineering – in one year. In large corporations and expensive areas, sooner or later you will have to get used to the fact that a sought-after IT specialist will soon be in a salary range of 150,000 euros or higher.
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And not only there: sooner or later there will also be a shortage of personnel due to demographic change in the engineering and healthcare sectors, and in previously unsuspicious business areas such as marketing or sales.
This feeds the ever-expanding pay bubble among knowledge workers – apart from cases like civil servants. Which contains explosives on several levels.
First there is the social level. A doctor already earns many times as much as a nurse or geriatric nurse. Even if the latter were promised salary increases during the pandemic, the income gap is more likely to widen than close in the coming years. After all, a five or ten percent increase in salary at 30,000 or 40,000 euros is significantly less in absolute terms than five or ten percent of 100,000 or 130,000 euros.
Internal tensions are also likely to increase when an IT specialist in a production facility soon earns four to five times as much as a line worker.
The risk of a single employee being absent increases with income
Of course, performance – and this includes studies, a doctorate, special technical expertise or management responsibility – must be worthwhile for the individual employee. But the ever-increasing salaries, for example in the event of termination, burnout or restructuring, also pose a great entrepreneurial risk for employers.
In the future, corporations and medium-sized companies are threatened with greater financial difficulties than they already are today if sought-after specialists are poached away or are absent and the next candidate – here too the length of service with the company is uncertain – has to be trained. This phenomenon is already a problem in the IT sector in particular. It will soon become standard in a variety of industries.
There is no easy way out of this dilemma. The shortage of skilled workers has long since turned the labor market into an applicant market. Employers can only play the game – as far as their own financial situation allows – and strive to be the best possible employer for all employees: from simple employees in production to middle managers or IT staff in demand.
More: These jobs will not only be in demand on the labor market until 2030 – they will also be well paid