A number of things can influence career progression and salary such as results, professional networking/relationships, and ambition.

The biggest factor is the value you bring to the table, and creating new value that results in the progression. You may get mediocre cost-of-living adjustments by merely doing your current job, with the current level of responsibilities, at the current level of output. But big raises and significant career progression only occurs AFTER you’ve increased your value FIRST.

Why would you get a raise for doing what you’re already paid to do?

Here’s a list of ways you can increase your value:

1. Increased responsibility
2. Increased ownership
3. Increased knowledge (of the systems, of the business, subject matter expertise, technologies, etc…)
4. Going above and beyond (working extra hours to meet a deadline, taking it upon oneself to fix an issue ailing the team, etc…)
5. Increased quality of work
6. Increased reliability (e.g. can be counted on to deliver something as promised, etc…)
7. Increased speed (what used to take 2 days you can now get done in 4hrs, faster turn around time, etc…)
8. Increased commitment
9. Increased dependability, predictability, availability, etc…
10. Increased ability to rapidly solve complex issues/problems
11. Increased output/results (e.g. # of tickets/user stories resolved)
12. Increased sharing of knowledge (documents, knowledge base articles, presentations to the team)
13. Increased savings to the company.
14. Increased profits to the company.