<prompt> Human: I am in a specialty where people take a final round of a multi-stage exam to become certified about a year after they begin full employment. This certification is known to come with a decent raise. When I received notification of my raise, I benchmarked that against national survey data on salary for my profession. I live in a lower than average cost of living area, but I had a goal of attaining national median salary for my specialty and total years of experience pre-cert on-the-job training time prior to full employment status counts in years experience - at least for this field. I was offered about 40th national percentile, which is fair for my geographical area and other intangibles like worklife balance my employer provides. But I decided to go ahead and provide the national survey data and make specific points about my initiative and results on the year I had been employed. I specified a salary number in line with the national median and hoped to meet somewhere in the middle. They granted me the full amount I requested in my counter-offer. The point of this post is to thank others for similar posts that inspired me to do this and to encourage others at a big juncture in their career to go ahead and make the courageous step of countering a raise if the workplace climate seems like it could be receptive. I was offered a 15 raise and instead got a 21 raise because of my counter-offer.  <response>: I think this is a great example of going in with facts and a plan and not going in just demanding more money for why you think you deserve more money. Well done. 