Dan Magallanes, CEO of Headhunter Manila, says your salary should be four times your age. Meaning if you are 30 years old, you should be getting P120,000 monthly – at least.
Bink, blink, blink.
I make a mental roll call of my acquaintances and close friend and find that I can pull out only 10 percent of the names in my roster that meet this rough rule of thumb. CEOs, senior management in a multinational firm or entrepreneurs who have already made it big in their chosen businesses are what their calling cards say.
What does that mean? If we are not getting this kind of pay scale, we should get a career consultant to fix our sagging careers, Magallanes says. I admit that the previous sentence is laced with a bit of jaded flippancy, but the headhunter makes an impassioned case on why paying a career consultant a hefty fee is worth it, even when our salaries are languishing.
I have observed that most of our executives and professionals at any point in their career would rather buy a high-end mobile phone or an expensive designer bag than pay a career consultant for their stagnant or sagging career. They tend to forget that they have to live on a parallel lifestyle based on their position in the company and of course their take-home pay. If you are bent on having a good career, you have to focus on how you will attain it at a certain paradigm. It is not wanting but not doing anything.
He cites several cases to drive home the point. Here’s one: a 38-year-old who graduated from a “not-so-known college in the southern part of the country” gets half-a-million per month on top of dizzying perks, besting nine other candidates from top universities. He even got a sign-on bonus of $50,000. He had no MBA and does not intend to get one.
Raising your eyebrows yet? Here’s another one:
Magallanes says he plucked this 28-year-old communications officer who graduated from an up-town college in the south from an international NGO and placed him in a blue-chip company for three times his salary in the NGO. This blue-chip company was bought by another giant, so Magallanes advices him to get a job somewhere else. Three months of searching ends up a dud and guy gets nervous. Magallanes tells him to be an entrepreneur. On his first month, he earned his salary for the first quarter of the following year.
I would love to meet this guy and get him to coach MoneySmarts readers next year. In a country where UP, La Salle, Ateneo and UA&P lords it over all the others, a guy who says he does not look for MBAs from top universities has something important to say to Filipinos. But here’s the most controversial part in his article:
“The best career is in the Philippines nowadays. Blue-chip companies are coming our way. This is the place to become successful. The most comfortable life is here. You leave the country because you feel you cannot make it here. If you cannot make it here, you cannot make it anywhere.”
True or false?
Read the entire article here.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
In the quote “If you cannot make it here, you cannot make it anywhere.” is uncalled for and not true. As an OFW who did not have a degree but still made in top management in a big corporate firm. I’d like to encourage all that one needs to have faith in God, courage to stand all opposition, and the Filipino’s “Need to survive, no matter what” attitude can take us places we have never been or even dreamed of.
April 7th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
what!?!?! four times salary of my age… if I’m 26, i should be getting 104,000 US Dollars a month!?!?… yeah right!
doesn’t make any sense…
October 21st, 2007 at 2:14 pm
@hachiko: i’d have to disagree. that would have made sense if he actually said he “earns” P25,000 per hour and not “charges” that rate outright from those seeking professional career advice alone.
i agree though that earning that amount couldn’t be far-fetched not because he has to but maybe because of other avenues such as other corporate investments and fees they get from corporate clients to which they provided headhunting services. personally however i would be skeptical when that i-charge line’s used to justify how great a deal 2,500 an hour supposed to be.
October 20th, 2007 at 9:44 am
@ uno — wala siguro makuhang clients kaya binaba sa 2,500 per hour. =P
@hachiko — the agex4 formula must have been conceptualized during the drafting of the article. =|
@salve — keep up the great work. Just use Dee’s criticism as fuel to improve.
October 19th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
qwerty et al, look, Dan has to charge 25k an hour so he could compensate all 15 staff or so 120k a month - headhunting staff, janitors n maids! hehehe. bale 23.4M annual payroll nya. makes sense actually