Young workers are going all in with salary transparency, whether they're sharing how much they're paid with social media followers or co-workers and friends in real life. And Charlotte Chaze, 32, a Philadelphia-based tech worker took it another step further: She recently posted the salaries of all of her previous jobs to her LinkedIn profile.
In the experience section of her profile, Chaze starts off with the unpaid research assistant jobs she held as a chemistry major at Towson University before graduating in 2013. She goes on to document each of her full-time jobs, and how much they paid, since then — from $28,000 to be a research assistant, $70,000 as an analytics associate, all the way up to her last corporate job earning $158,000 as a senior analytics manager for AT&T.
She saved enough in a few months in that role to quit her job in April 2022 and focus on her own company, Break Into Tech, a career resource for people looking for their first tech job, where she brought in north of $200,000 in her first year.
"I believe in salary transparency, and I wanted to show others what's possible," Chaze tells CNBC Make It. "I've gotten huge salary increases by teaching myself new skills online and job hopping," she says. She credits free online courses that taught her data analytics and fueled her career change into tech.
After switching from academia to data analytics, she says, "I wanted to show the trajectory of exactly how I made my way from that $28,000 all the way to $158,000 to encourage others to go for what they deserve by showing that it's possible."
Chaze also posted about her experiment on Tiktok, which has been viewed more than 21,000 times, saying, "I know this won't catch on on LinkedIn, but [imagine] if it did."
Despite the buzz of her experiment, Chaze says she doesn't actually recommend other workers do the same because it could work against them. Research shows one contributing factor to racial and gender wage gaps is that employers continue to underpay marginalized workers by basing their salaries on what they've earned in the past, which could be artificially low due to discrimination.
Rather, Chaze would rather companies carry the responsibility of salary transparency. "It's on the employer to be transparent, not the employee," she says, "and I'm in a unique position to be able to share my past salaries because I'm no longer a W-2 employee."
Some 26.6% of the U.S. labor force, or nearly 44.8 million people, live in a state where employers are required by law to list salary ranges in public job postings, and that share could double in the coming years.
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