Careers with a paycheck: What you earn when you start your job and what you earn after ten years

Life in Germany has become significantly more expensive in the last two years. A salary increase would be just right. But not every employee listens to this request, as an evaluation by the employer rating platform Kununu shows. The job portal evaluated 835,000 salary details from the past two years, including 625,000 from 2023 alone. Result: Compared to the previous year, salaries increased by just 1.8 percent. The inflation rate, however, was around 6 percent in 2023 and almost 7 percent in 2022.

Now, higher costs for weekly shopping are not the best argument you can make to your boss for more money. Professional experience, on the other hand, is definitely an asset that employees can use to make a profit. The Kununu data shows that employees sometimes make significant salary increases as they gain experience.

If you only look at young professionals with up to three years of job experience who have stored their salary data on the portal, the average gross annual salary across all professions is just under 41,000 euros. For employees with three to six years of professional experience it is around 47,000 euros and for six to ten years it is a good 51,000 euros. According to the evaluation, experienced workers with more than ten years under their belt earn an average of almost 58,000 euros.

Who makes which salary increases?

A key to higher salaries is moving up the career ladder: According to the evaluation, employees with human resources responsibility earn 29 percent more than their colleagues without management positions. Changing employers can also be a good opportunity for a big jump in salary. In addition, large companies often pay better than small ones and more in economically strong regions than in structurally weak regions.

The analysis also shows that the salary jumps are larger in some industries than in others. Employees at banks and insurance companies can increase their starting salary by 43 percent in less than ten years. The salary jumps are similarly high in the areas of Internet and telecommunications as well as marketing, advertising and PR.

The table below shows salary trends in 15 professions that are commonly searched on the Kununu platform. The middle column shows the average salary of all employees who have anonymously stated their salary on the platform. The left column only looks at young professionals with up to three years of professional experience and the right column looks at the salaries of particularly experienced workers. All values ​​are gross annual salaries of full-time employees. Blatant outliers are eliminated using statistical methods to avoid distortion of the average values.

The examples show that the salary gap between well-paid and less well-paid professions often widens over the course of a career. Engineers, controllers or software developers can increase their salary by more than 20,000 euros over the course of their career. Automotive mechatronics engineers or warehouse workers, on the other hand, only make comparatively small leaps even with a lot of professional experience.

Gross annual salaries and professional experience in selected professions

Source: Kununu; own representation; Salary data from 2023 and 2022