Giving a career talk in my old university, how prominently should I tell students my salary? I have offered to do a talk at my old university’s 'employabilty fair' ten years after graduation, where am I now. With some advice on traps to avoid, how to make the transition from university to work life etc., with some anecdotes along the way type thing. Within the realms of software engineering.

The person who asked me to do the talk thinks I should put my current salary on the first slide to grab their attention in a 'this is what you could aim for' type way. But I feel it's a bit crass. I don't mind sharing my salary with the students if they ask, but I think it's a bit odd to stick it on the first slide.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this that could help me make this decision?



Update

the talk went down very well, no one asked about my salary and I didn't see anyone suddenly become more engaged after I pointed to the salaries in the Glass door table. 

There were a few very engaged students who I think will do just fine, they definitely seemed more interested in my day to day and whether I actually enjoyed it :p it was good to see. 

There were a couple that might have listened more intently if I had framed it as "I earn X and this is how you can do to" but I'm glad I didn't. In the end of the day that might have got a couple more students to care a little bit more but the focus of the rest of my talk was for the students that love software engineering. Career traps to avoid (manipulative managers, stagnation etc), the differences between uni and job mentality (individual vs team etc) and the fact that I enjoy my job (and that its not just coding all day :) )
I agree with you. I feel the request to put your salary on a slide (on the first slide, no less!) is rather unexpected, and quite frankly does not speak highly about the professionalism of your contact. I would decline this, for multiple reasons:


Your salary is nobody's business. Not sure what more there is to say about this.
Students are, for the largest part, intelligent adults. Many would take this exactly for what it's meant to be - rather crude marketing and hype generation. This would detract from the message you actually want to transport, and would undermine your following talk.
Focusing so much on how much you make is arguably not the best way to motivate young people for a specific career path anyway. If you talk about why you love your job (if you do) will encourage more people than a six-digits salary number. More importantly, it will probably encourage the people who will actually be happy doing your job, not the ones who would end up wealthy and miserable.


You can of course provide a salary range as proposed by other answers, but I would not emphasize this point much (and base it on third-party data, such as Glassdoor, not just your own experience).