A colleague once told me, half-joking, that the fastest way to get a raise was to quit. She wasn’t entirely wrong. Research from ADP and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has consistently shown that job switchers tend to out-earn job stayers, sometimes by several percentage points a year.
But switching companies is expensive in ways that don’t show up on a pay stub. New politics to navigate and new unwritten rules to learn. A reset on trust, credibility, and the relationships you spent years building.
Sometimes the leap pays off. Sometimes you trade a known frustration for an unknown one and find yourself updating your resume again eighteen months later.
So what if the better play, at least for now, is to grow your market value inside the company you’re already in? It’s not a consolation prize. Done well, it’s a strategy.
What Does “Market Value” Actually Mean?
Your market value is the price an informed buyer, your current employer or the next one, would pay for the unique mix of skills, results, and reputation you bring. It’s not your salary. Salary is what you’re paid. Market value is what you’re worth. The gap between the two is where your leverage lives.
Three things move the needle:
- Skills that are scarce, transferable, and verifiably yours.
- Visible results tied to outcomes the business actually cares about.
- Reputation, i.e., what people say about you when you’re not in the room.
You can grow all three without ever updating your LinkedIn headline to “Open to Work.”
How to be Strategic About Increasing Your Market Value
There’s a myth in career advice that loyalty is naive. That if you’re not interviewing, you’re stagnating. I’d push back on that. Interviewing is a great way to get confident about how you talk about yourself, but it doesn’t have to automatically lead to a job switch.
Staying gives you something a new hire can’t buy: reputation capital. You know which projects matter, which leaders are rising, where the political third rails are buried. That knowledge is a multiplier. Pair it with deliberate growth, and you become genuinely hard to replace, which is the foundation of any real negotiation.
The mistake isn’t staying but doing so passively. Here are five strategies to deploy, starting today.
If you’re not sure how visible your work actually is right now, take the Career Visibility Diagnostic, a 10-15-minute reflection designed to help you see where the next move really starts.
1. Build a “Scarcity Skill” on Company Time
Look at your industry and ask: what skill, if I had it in 12 months, would make me dramatically more valuable to both my current employer and the broader market?
For a finance analyst, it might be Python or SQL. For a comms professional, AI fluency and prompt design. For an ops leader, change management or cross-border M&A integration.
Then, find a way to practice it on a real internal project. A book, a course, a certification can be useful, but a scarcity skill applied to a live business problem results in a measurable outcome. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report keeps reinforcing the same point: analytical thinking, AI literacy, and resilience are the skills employers are racing to find. You don’t have to leave to learn them.
2. Engineer Visible Wins
Being busy is not the same as being seen. Ask yourself, brutally: “If I described my last six months to a hiring manager, would the wins be specific, quantified, and tied to revenue, risk, cost, or customer outcomes?”
If the answer is “kind of,” that’s a visibility problem, not a talent problem. Pick two or three projects per year that have a clear before-and-after story. Write the story down. Share it in skip-level meetings, performance reviews, and internal newsletters. Think of it as building the case file you’ll one day need.
3. Expand Your Internal Network On Purpose
Most people network outside the company when they’re unhappy. The smart move is to network inside the company before you ever need to.
Set a modest goal, such as one coffee a month with someone two levels above you or in a function adjacent to yours. No agenda beyond curiosity. Over a year, that’s 12 advocates who know your name and your work, and any one of them could pull you into the room where promotions are decided.
4. Get Paid in Skills, Sponsorship, And Scope
When salary increases are capped, negotiate the things that compound. These could include a stretch assignment, budget for a credential, seat on a cross-functional task force, access to an executive sponsor, or time to lead an internal AI pilot.
These don’t show up on your paystub, but do show up on your next offer letter. Think of compensation as a portfolio, not a paycheck. There is extensive research on the role of sponsors versus mentors and their impact on your career; sponsors spend their political capital on you. That’s worth negotiating for.
5. Build a Public Point Of View
External visibility tends to indirectly (and directly) raise your internal value. When you publish a thoughtful LinkedIn post, speak on a panel, or get quoted in a trade publication, two things happen. Your employer sees you as a brand asset. And your market sees you, full stop. You don’t need a million followers. You need a credible point of view in a defined niche.
Start with one topic you genuinely care about, and get yourself in front of peers, industry colleagues, and relevant stakeholders. Twelve months of consistency will out-perform twelve months of perfection.
Final Reflection on Market Value
Increasing your market value isn’t about plotting your escape. It’s about making sure that wherever you choose to be—here, somewhere new, or somewhere you haven’t imagined yet—you’re choosing from a position of strength, not scarcity.
The best time to grow your market value was five years ago. The second best time is the Monday morning after you read this.
You don’t need a sabbatical to get start. Try these four small steps:
- Write down and quantify the three results you’re most proud of from the last year.
- Identify one scarcity skill to build over the next twelve months.
- Book one internal coffee with someone whose career you admire.
- Draft one short LinkedIn post about something you learned recently.
Build like you’re staying, but be ready like you’re not. That’s a leadership trait you can exercise without a leader title.
