  More than 36,000 students and post-docs will be involved in experiments at
the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) until 2025. Do they expect that their learning
experience will have an impact on their professional future? By drawing from
earlier salary expectations literature, this paper proposes a framework aiming
at explaining the professional expectations of early career researchers (ECR)
at the LHC. Results from different ordered logistic models suggest that
experiential learning at LHC positively correlates with both current and former
students' salary expectations. At least two not mutually exclusive explanations
underlie such a relationship. First, the training at LHC gives early career
researchers valuable expertise, which in turn affects salary expectations;
secondly, respondents recognise that the LHC research experience per se may act
as a signal in the labour market. Respondents put a price tag on their
experience at LHC, a "salary premium" ranging from 5% to 12% in terms of future
salaries compared with what they would have expected without such experience.
