Climbing the Ladder to $200k as a 28-Year-Old Consultant in NYC

Salary Steps #2
Salary Steps is a series based on the principle of salary transparency. My aim with this series is to share interviews with professionals from varied backgrounds to elucidate their paths to earning what they deserve and doing what they love. Feel free to reach out if you or anyone you know would like to be interviewed anonymously for a later edition of Salary Steps!

Him:
He is a 28-year-old Consultant working in the heart of New York City and he earns a salary of $200,000/year. He is about 6 years into his career—including a 2-year break to pursue a company-funded MBA—and has held 3 different full-time roles at 1 company.

His Role:
He currently holds the title of Associate at a large global consulting firm. His role is centered around advising clients on key business decisions. Some cases involve working more directly with clients, while others lean heavily toward independent task execution. Key attributes and skills in the role include coordination, detail orientation, understanding takeaways, decision making, and research. Whether interfacing with data vendors or clients, the ability to decipher and distill complex information into palatable messages is often critical.

His day-to-day function includes leveraging tools like R, Python, SAS, GIS software, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. His skills in statistics, economics (particularly microeconomics), and finance all contribute to his success in role. In addition, analytical thinking and problem solving play foundational parts in the efforts to contextualize and interpret data in areas such as market performance.

His Salary Steps:
$78,000/year
Bonus: ~$5,000
Research Analyst
(August 2018 – December 2018)
He took his first Salary Steps after graduating from a private University in 2018. As a Research Analyst, he began in the learning stage. He had relatively little business context, so he focused on asking questions, learning best practices, and demonstrating initiative while also contributing wherever possible to thought leadership within the organization.

$80,000/year
Bonus: ~$12,000
Research Analyst
(January 2019 – December 2019)
His next Salary Step came as an incremental raise within role. As time passed, though his title remained the same, his function shifted to become more independent, allowing for autonomy and empowering him to make judgements when presented with client information. In general, the complexity of the tasks in each day or week increased with time.

$95,000/year
Bonus: $30,000
Senior Research Analyst
(January 2020 – December 2020)
Now with some valuable experience and perspective from his time as a Research Analyst, he took his next Salary Step with an internal promotion to the role of Senior Research Analyst. In a sense, the formalized transition to the role happened after already having expanded his responsibilities in the preceding months. Those new responsibilities included overseeing the work of junior analysts, providing mentorship, and more direct client facing. All the while, he was vocal about his desire to grow within the organization and did all he could to seize the opportunities presented to him.

$100,000/year
Bonus: $28,000
Senior Research Analyst
(January 2021 – December 2021)
Another year meant another incremental salary raise. This Salary Step came with even more responsibility, again blurring the line between roles as he prepared for the next structured step up the ladder to the role of Associate. In some cases, this even meant training Associates hired from other organizations on company best practices and more.

$105,000/year
Bonus (partial year): ~$10,000
Senior Research Analyst
(January 2022 – June 2022)
Now approaching the start of his MBA program with funding support from his company, he received another in-role raise in recognition of his continued development. Responsibilities largely remained the same.

$200,000/year
Bonus (expected): ~$50,000
Associate
(starting September 2024)
In acknowledgement of the impending completion of his MBA program, his most recent and most dramatic Salary Step came again from the organization with which he began his career. He anticipates this role will bring yet more responsibility, adding tasks associated with case planning and even delegation across more junior members of small work groups.

His Why:
From the kickoff of his career, he heavily valued the idea of exploring different areas of business through the lens of his values. With that in mind, consulting made sense as it gave him exposure to a variety of clients and business problems to apply his analytical mind to. As he found the fit appropriate from early on, it made the most sense to climb within the structure of the organization rather than seek Salary Steps outside.

This was reinforced during his experiences throughout his MBA program, wherein he was able to gain internship experience (not tabulated here) in a more traditional, non-consulting industry. In short, the experience pointed him right back to his roots in consulting, and he now looks forward to the prospect of returning to work in the Fall.

In reflection, the firm he works for—a mid-sized company relative to competition—suits him well as he has been able to affect both his team and the company as a whole. His coworkers are ambitious, motivated, and intellectually curious in addition to being fun to be around. These social factors have played more of a role as he’s gotten older and less willing to sacrifice so much for his career, now optimizing not just on career success but on overall lifestyle.

From a financial perspective, his Salary Steps have signified quantifiable achievement in part, while also contributing to feelings of security through the prospects for wealth accrual. He was raised in a modest upbringing despite coming from a higher income family and has taken the lessons of that intentional lifestyle to heart, freeing himself from worrying over small purchases. His desires to do things for friends, invest time in hobbies, keep health a focus, and overall value his free time are key factors in his aspirations to continue climbing the income ladder.

With all this in mind, he recognizes that his successes are attributable to luck at least in part, having been born into a situation surrounded by particularly motivated people and having been afforded the opportunity to go to a great University. As such, he approaches his continuing Salary Steps with a sense of humility. Success begets success, and he hopes his path will serve as a valuable reference to those seeking to pursue a similar direction.

Written by Kanan R Wanha