What a job title is worth outside the building

Everything here earned its place by changing an outcome. Nothing about job titles and market value is included to round the number up.

Titles are set for internal reasons

Organisations use titles to signal hierarchy, to settle disputes about seniority and occasionally to reward someone when there is no money available. None of those reasons has anything to do with how the same word is understood by another employer in the same city.

The result is that two people with identical titles at different companies can be doing work of very different scope and value. It also means a title change with no change in responsibility is a common and inexpensive way to close a pay conversation. Recognising that transaction when it is offered is the difference between accepting a gift and accepting a substitute for one.

The market prices scope, not labels

When someone assesses you externally they are working out how many people you influenced, what budget you touched and what changed because of you. The title is a shorthand they use to guess at those things, and it is discarded the moment better information appears. This is why a plainly written description of scope beats an impressive label in almost every selection process.

It is also why people with modest titles and large responsibilities are frequently underpaid until they describe the work accurately. The correction is usually a matter of language rather than of achievement, which makes it unusually cheap to fix.

Inflation and deflation both cause problems

Some sectors and some small organisations hand out senior titles freely, which can leave you looking overqualified and underexperienced at once. Other organisations are deliberately conservative, and their people are consistently read as more junior than the work they actually do. Either mismatch costs money, because both make it harder for an outsider to place you accurately against their own structure.

Put simply, the signal to watch is whether people with your title elsewhere are doing recognisably the same job. Where they are not, you are carrying a translation problem that you will have to solve explicitly.

When a title costs you real money

A title that reads as too senior can price you out of roles you would enjoy and could do, before anyone reads the detail. A title that reads as too junior can see applications filtered out automatically, particularly where selection is done at volume. It can also anchor a new employer low, since many of them benchmark an offer against what they assume you currently earn.

In practice, where the mismatch is large, addressing it directly in the first line of any description works better than hoping it goes unnoticed. The cost is invisible because it appears as roles that never come back to you rather than as a rejection you can point to.

Check yours against the market occasionally

Reading job advertisements for your title, in your region, is free research and tells you whether the label still means what you think. Pay attention to the responsibilities listed rather than to salary ranges, which are often absent or deliberately wide. Where advertisements for your title describe work well below yours, you have outgrown the label rather than the role.

Put simply, where they describe work well above yours, that is worth knowing before an interview rather than during one. Doing this once a year, without being in a search, keeps your sense of your own market position roughly accurate.

If that does not fit your week, it is not a failure of willpower.

Negotiate the label as well as the number

When accepting a role the title is usually more flexible than the salary, because it costs the employer nothing in the current budget. A title that describes the work accurately is worth real money at the next move, and the next move is where most increases happen. Where an internal promotion carries no immediate money, a clear and externally legible title is a reasonable thing to ask for instead.

The version to avoid is a bespoke internal label that no other employer uses, since it converts to nothing outside the building. Ask what the role would be called elsewhere, and try to be called that.

Everything above, in order of what to do first

1. Titles are set for internal reasons. Organisations use titles to signal hierarchy, to settle disputes about seniority and occasionally to reward someone when there is no money available.
2. The market prices scope, not labels. When someone assesses you externally they are working out how many people you influenced, what budget you touched and what changed because of you.
3. Inflation and deflation both cause problems. Some sectors and some small organisations hand out senior titles freely, which can leave you looking overqualified and underexperienced at once.
4. When a title costs you real money. A title that reads as too senior can price you out of roles you would enjoy and could do, before anyone reads the detail.
5. Check yours against the market occasionally. Reading job advertisements for your title, in your region, is free research and tells you whether the label still means what you think.
6. Negotiate the label as well as the number. When accepting a role the title is usually more flexible than the salary, because it costs the employer nothing in the current budget.

The takeaway

Ask what your job would be called elsewhere, and make sure that is what you are called.

The version you keep doing is the version that works.