- Earlier this year I made a video all about
the history of my salaries that I have been paid
throughout my design career.
Right from when I first started the industry
up until my most recent pay rise in November last year.
In that video, I talked about the fact that
at the company I work at, which is ConvertKit, by the way,
in case you didn't know that, we have standardized salaries,
which means that for every role
that everyone is in within the company,
there are four or five different salary levels
that you can be yet based on
experience and your skills, et cetera.
I really love that we have that
because it means that anyone who is at the same skill level
doing the same job is gonna be paid equally,
and it gives me a lot of confidence that
I'm being paid fairly.
All of our salaries are based on being
in the 50th percentile of the market
going rates for each role.
I'm really excited to be able to share this with you
because when I shared my own personal journey,
one of my concerns was that my entry level salary,
that first one I had in my career
is just not really relevant for today's going market rates.
And I didn't want people to think
that that's what they should be asking for.
I'm gonna share with you the five different salary levels
that we have for web designers at ConvertKit,
as well as what skills and experience
you'd be required to have at each level.
So let's get into it.
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At level one, you're an entry level web designer,
and the salary for this label is $60,000.
At this first level, it's probably
your first job in the industry out of design school
or perhaps I know you've been teaching yourself
for about a year and maybe doing some client work
and you're ready to like start working at a company now
and keeping to build on those skills.
You'd be coming in with a really good knowledge
of design tools, but be doing a lot of learning
on the job about company processes
and like working within a team and that sort of thing.
At this level you're probably gonna be working on
lower stakes projects and with a lot of supervision
from more experienced designers on the team,
and the work you're doing is probably gonna be
more on the production side
than on the deep problem solving side.
At level two, you'd be a junior web designer
and your salary for this level is $78,000.
For this role, you've probably got about two years
of design experience under your belt,
but what's more important to them
the number of years of experience
is the type of experience that you've had
and the skills you've been building,
the type of work you've been doing throughout that time.
I'll continue to share the years expectation
for each role though,
because I do think it helps to set some context.
At a junior level, you'd start working on
some more complex projects
still with the more experienced designers,
but you probably be much less supervised
for the smaller, more production type tasks now.
So as an example, you might work
with a more experienced designer on creating something like
a new feature page for the marketing website,
but you'd be left to your own devices like unsupervised
to create things like social media imagery
or like digital design assets.
At this level, you've had design experience
working within a company and working on lots of projects,
and so you have a really good understanding
of the design process as a whole,
and you're probably starting
to pick up a few other skills as well.
Perhaps that's HTML and CSS or animation illustration,
I don't know, you're adding into your tool bag.
The next level up level three,
you're a career level web designer,
and the salary for this is $95,000.
At this level, you are definitely
an experienced design professional
and while you're still gonna have a manager,
you won't be supervised as such
throughout the design process.
You've probably got at least five years of experience
working as a design professional at this level,
and you're really good at things like attention to detail,
thinking about hover states, interactions, animations,
all that sort of thing that comes in as part of your work.
You'll probably be solving a more diverse range of problems
at this level, and you'll also be expected
to take more initiative to,
so you absolutely can't be just
waiting around to be told what to do.
You gotta have the initiative to figure it out for yourself
or know who to ask to help solve your problems.
So at this level you start to become
much more self-sufficient.
At level four, you're an advanced level web designer
and the salary for this level is $115,000.
And this is the level that I'm at right now.
At this stage you definitely become more of a leader.
And when I say that,
I don't necessarily mean like a manager of other people,
but you will be leading projects,
probably giving work assignments out to other designers,
leading decision-making for various design directions.
There's a lot more like coordination involved at this level,
but of course you're still a really great designer,
still pushing yourself to learn and get better and better,
and be producing super polished work.
The problems that you'll be tackling at this level
also become more complex,
and wider ranging I suppose where you're thinking
not just about the pixels you're creating
but you're thinking like further scope as well.
So the complete user experience,
how a thing you're designing fits into it,
thinking about business metrics and the ways
that your design will be helping towards that.
So you'll be spending time thinking about
all of these things instead of working on
a lot of the smaller tasks at this level.
Really at this level you're learning a lot about
the business as well and how your designs
and what you do on a day-to-day basis fits into it.
And at this level you've probably got about
eight years of experience as a designer.
Then we have level five which is the last level
in our salary bands currently.
At this level, you are an expert web designer
and the salary for this is $140,000.
At this level you are managing a design team
and you're the one giving supervision
to the less experienced designers.
You've got about 12 years of experience at this point
and the design work that you'd doing
is much more specialized.
The projects will be much more like high stakes
and will require a lot more expertise
and analysis as well as a super deep
solid understanding of the business.
Where in general you're using your design skills
to help better the company,
to help improve business metrics and objectives,
and you'll be responsible for that at this level.
So compared to level four, the advanced level,
level five involves a lot more responsibility
and thus more pressure too.
Those are the five different salary bands
that we have for the web design role at ConvertKit.
And as you can see, the jumps between them,
not just in terms of the salary number,
but also the skills and experience needed for each level,
they're quite big jumps.
And that means that this isn't a system
where you're getting a pay rise every six months.
You're like moving through
like getting your promotion all the time.
It's like something you're gonna work at for maybe
a few years to work to get your skills
to be at the point where
you're ready to be moved up to the next level.
Like I said, I really like the system
because I feel like I'm being paid fairly.
I like knowing that I'm being paid a 50th percentile,
like mid range salary for my role.
I know that I could get paid more if I wanted to go work for
one of the fancy tech companies,
but I really like the work that I do.
I love the company I met.
I love the lifestyle that I have at this company,
so it's all worth it to me.
I hope it's been useful for you to see this,
to get to see a 2020 snapshot of design salaries
at a bunch of different levels
that you know are sort of like mid-market range.
Maybe it will help you know what to negotiate for
when you're next looking for a job,
or I don't know, maybe it'll just show you what
the options are and just how far
you can push your career as well knowing this.
Thanks for watching, and please share this video
with any design friends that you have,
because I think the more we all talk about money
and make this a conversation that happens,
the better it is for everyone involved.
It'll help our whole industry raise up
and help more people to be paid fairly,
to be paid what they're worth.
So yeah, share away and let's like not make money
such a taboo topic anymore.
Give the video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it
and make sure you hit subscribe as well,
because, I mean, new videos
talking about design every single week,
and I'd love to see you back here for the next one.
All right, have a good day.
Bye.
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