Ah, sorry, in my industry (tech) most of our salaried jobs pay way better than minimum wage when considering your dollar per hour worked. So I'll happily work

Ah, sorry, in my industry (tech) most of our salaried jobs pay way better than minimum wage when considering your dollar per hour worked. So I'll happily work 50 hour weeks instead of 40 hours ones when I'm getting paid 10x as much. It's really quite a nice tradeoff vs, say, having to work two full-time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. It even compares quite nicely to other high-paying industries, e.g. in i-banking you work 80-100 hours a week the first two years (still making six figures mind you), but then those who survive get promoted, with a nominal salary bump, but the main difference being that you now get to work more normal 40-50 hour weeks. I don't know if I would use the word "trust". I'd probably characterize it more as "responsibility". You get paid more because you are the one responsible if those who report to you don't deliver. Your boss will only yell at you, not your reports. Management does not require necessarily _more_ skill, but still requires a skillset nonetheless. If you can make 100 people 10% more efficient, then theoretically you are worth 10 people. I _do_ believe that you need to be able to make your managers "trust" you in order to get promoted, but that's talking a bit more about how to actually move up in the corporate world. I also don't know if it's really that much a mystery how to make more money. Move into management. Move into higher-paying industries, like finance and tech. Own your own business (half of it being defacto making yourself a manager). I think mostly people don't have the privilege that allows them such mobility. You can usually get promoted to shift manager pretty easily within retail by, um, just never being late. But moving higher probably requires various social skills (such as gaining trust mentioned above) that certain upbringings will give you a massive head start on. Many industries require advanced degrees that require a heavy initial cash disbursement. And so on. Or are we saying, that you've chosen an industry that doesn't pay well because you personally like it, and want to get paid more? That's difficult if your company/industry just doesn't have that much excess money to throw around. Or are we talking about how to get paid more for your job without switching into management? There's probably an upper limit to what you'll get paid (usually companies have pay bands for each position), based on what the company considers to be the maximum value that can be provided by that position. So you want to make sure that you're getting paid commensurate with your output relative to your peers. And I guess that requires similar skills to getting promoted positions, but with a much lower bar, usually just around convincing your boss that you're generating the value that you are. If you've capped out that pay band, then your options are to convince the company to rethink their value system (generally impossible), switch to a different position, or switch to a different company.