TikToker Charlotte Chaze on how she went from a $28K salary to making $158k

A woman whose salary jumped from $28,000 to $158,000 in just four years has revealed how she managed to get the massive wage increase.

Data analyst Charlotte Chaze, whose company Break Into Tech is dedicated to teaching others how to land their dream job, shared in a clip on TikTok how she went from working in the “basement” of a research lab to earning six figures as an analyst at US telecommunications company AT&T.

In the video – which has since gone viral on the platform, drumming up close to one million views and more than 76,000 likes – the 31-year-old recalled earning just $28,000 a year when she started her career “as a biomedical researcher, in a basement lab that had no windows”.

“I was working long hours, the job wasn’t very rewarding, and obviously, the pay wasn’t very great,” Chaze said.

“In 2018, I decided I’d had enough and started looking for jobs, even ones I wasn’t qualified for, and I ended up landing one of those – a data analytics associate at a consulting company.”

While she was earning more money – with a salary of $70,000 – Chaze said she still wasn’t satisfied, spending most of her hours working on Excel documents and PowerPoint presentations.

So she decided to grow her expertise, learning how to decipher a programming language, which ultimately helped her score a better job.

“I again applied for jobs I wasn’t qualified for and ended up landing a job as a data analyst at Comcast. This job paid $90,000 and the reason I got it was because I taught myself [Structured Query Language] over a matter of a couple weeks using a website called Khan Academy,” Chaze said.

“During the interview process, I talked to them about the SQL projects I had done and they ended up offering me the position.”

After 18 months in the position, Chaze said she was promoted to analyst manager – boosting her annual salary to $104,000. A year later, she received a job offer from AT&T.

“A recruiter from AT&T reached out to me about a job that would pay $158,000,” she said.

“I went through the interview process and eventually got the offer in December 2021. This is all because I put myself out there and applied to jobs that I didn’t really feel like I was qualified for, but knew I could handle.

“And most importantly, I taught myself data analytics online.”

In a follow-up video, Chaze shared some more tips – saying that people often sell themselves short when applying for jobs.

“Any experience you have can be relevant experience. [You have to just] reframe your perspective,” she said.

“Almost anyone can break in; all you have to do is try to teach yourself the skills online. You can even do that for free.

“So many people I worked with don’t have degrees, don’t have previous experience in tech roles. They taught themselves the skills and broke in just like I did.”