With my company, the only way to get promoted is to apply for an open spot, usually in another area/division. Part of the manager’s job is “career development” in their staff, and they’re expected to mentor people who want to move up. Take this class, do this extra task, job shadow that job. Things that show clear growth, to make you marketable to other areas.
In a way, I’m in very much the same situation as you. Business analyst, the “go to” person for system reporting, Excel and Access solutions to business needs. I recently applied for a job with a different manager, and was the #2 choice. The person they picked doesn’t have any data skills at all (a large part of the job, working with and understanding data). Now I’m expected to create Access databases and reporting to dumb the data down for the person who got the job, and train her how to use them, while she’s got the job grade bump and pay raise. This has me angry and I don’t really care who knows it.
Ouch, St.Germain, I feel ya. Earlier this year I applied to an internal opening to try to get out of this dysfunctional team (DF). Remember I mentioned that this DF requires deep industry experience. The position I applied for was a low-level project management office job, collecting data about project statuses and reporting on it - no industry experience needed. I was turned down in favor of another internal candidate and I was told the reason is that she has industry experience. That made no sense at all to me, and it’s one of the things that made me wonder if people just don’t like working with me for some reason.
I don’t know if you’re “Milton” or not, but in my years of working in various jobs in various the patterns are pretty clear. Whether blue collar or professional, certain traits exist in people who are promotable and certain traits exist in people who never get promoted or fail miserably when they get even a small promotion. It took many years lots of business and accounting courses to feel like I had an understanding of why this was and the benefit to business.
Yes, I’m aware that she’s gotten elevations due to changing jobs but that’s a different thing from internal promotions. In my experience, when there’s a person on the team who never gets internally promoted, everyone on the team apart from the person in question knows.
Yes, but what caused you to get assigned to legacy systems in the first place? Nobody forced you to go down that route. My hunch is that other people somehow peg you as someone who will never complain and never actively ask for anything and that they take advantage of this to never promote you.
I’ve never worked with you though so I don’t know if that’s it.
Well, when I started my career they weren’t legacy systems. I suspect that I developed strong expertise there. FWIW, I was working on Cobol, Basic, Fortran on DEC Minicomputers back then, and this was just slightly before the IBM PC launched. When PC’s did make their entrance as business machines, the companies I was working with seemed to prefer to keep me on the Cobol/Basic/Fortran apps and hire people to support the PCs.
I also sense that for later employers, they hired me for a specific job and wouldn’t let me branch out of that. I don’t want to flatter myself by thinking that I was just too good at what I was doing. I have on occasion in later years let myself get sloppy and/or lazy to see if I get promoted (again referring to Office Space) but that hasn’t worked.
In some sense it’s a different thing than internal promotions, but for purposes of this discussion it’s not any different. The only thing that matters is how often the promotions are, and - related - the relationship of current experience/skill level to position.
At an extreme, suppose the norm in the industry is for people to be promoted every 3 years. And consider a person who switches jobs every 3 years, getting promoted each time. This person would rarely if ever get an internal promotion even if they followed a normal career progression, since they would always be within 3 years of their most recent promotion and not due for another. And after 20 years following this approach they would find themselves in roughly the same position as a typical person who worked for the same firm for that 20 years and received internal promotions every 3 years.
I get from the OP that she feels she has not had the typical number of promotions that she might have expected, but the extent of this disconnect is unclear since she has gotten some unspecified number of job-transfer promotions. She might have had the expected number of promotions due to someone who was in the field for 5 years or she might have gotten the number expected for someone with 15 years of experience. The difference is in that in the first case there’s reason to suspect that she might have some huge glaring issue such that “pretty much everyone around [her] knows what the problem is”. While in the second case it’s a more minor disconnect and she might conceivably have gotten a bad break here and there, and at any rate there might not be any big issue obvious to everyone besides her, such that asking opinions of coworkers might just produce random guesswork that it’s a mistake to focus on.
For more than 20 years I was settled in to the very lowest ranks of management. I got excellent performance reviews, I mentored literally a generation of employees, I got my work done on time and on budget. Why wasn’t I ever promoted to upper management?
One easy answer. I could never bring in business. Sure, existing clients loved me. Sure, I was a part of the development teams. But when it came to leading a pitch, I was to put it mildly, a disaster. In 20 years I successfully developed and delivered exactly one project.
In my line of work, if you didn’t bring in new business, you didn’t get the bigger office.
JcWoman, what’s one thing the people who get promoted past you have in common? Client relations? Managing budgets? Long-range planning? Whatever it is, you have to identify it and then develop and demonstrate to management that you can do that part of the job, as well.
To be perfectly honest, I haven’t seen many people promoted over me in my entire career. The vast majority of coworkers have done what I’ve done: managed career mobility by changing employers. That may be due to the industry I’ve worked in (IT) and it may also be just the general employment environment in the USA over the past 30 years.
Of the few who I’ve seen promoted, it seems like a charisma thing. They somehow get someone in upper management who likes them and gives them a chance at stretching. In the first half of my career I also fell into the trap of believing that if you did a good job, and got consistent “exceeds expectations” in performance reviews, your boss would give you rank promotions (i.e. from Developer I to Developer II). That turned out to not be the case, and I had to actually have someone tell me that I had to ASK for even those rank promotions.
I also know a few who were promoted only after years of bitching and moaning about not being promoted. Those were the ones who stuck with the same employer for a decade or longer.
Also, for the charisma promotions, I’ve seen an equal number of people actually DEmoted, although they never call it that. They just “move to a different role”.
There’s only one person who I’ve ever seen have a quick and regular career ladder. One lady who was hired into the company (a prior company in my career) as a customer service rep (i.e. phones), promoted to software developer, promoted again to project manager, then to “capture manager” and then off to other divisions where I lost track of her. She managed all of this in ten years, which is quite the talent.
One of my oldest friends has been on the sales side of IT for awhile now. I lost count how many companies she’s worked for. She has a pattern of putting in her time, then looking for the next step up. If she can’t get that with her current employer, she starts her job search in earnest.
She makes extremely good money. On the flip side, she travels maybe 3 weeks out of every month. Her husband works from home and takes care of their kids.
My husband is an IT professional (not sales) and is just realizing that he has to change his tune if he wants to stay in the industry. He’s been told by two recruiters that some travel is expected in his niche. My husband hates traveling, but if that’s how the business is going, and if he wants to have and/or keep a job, he’s going to have to do it.
JcWoman, how often do you have lunch with your coworkers? Or your boss? Or hang out with them after hours? A large part of career progression, even in Software, is being well-liked and having a group of people that “have your back”. The thing I get from your posts is that you’re just there to work, not make friends. I see that attitude a lot, but it really is detrimental to your career. Humans are social animals, nobody wants to work with a robot. When I was hiring, my boss gave me the directive of “Hire someone you can work with for eight hours a day over any other criteria. We can teach someone to code, we can’t teach them not to be a jerk”. Obviously that is a bit of an extreme statement, but it’s rarely the technical skills that hold you back, it’s the soft skills.
I also wonder if you come off as a bit of a goody-two-shoes. Sure, you’re “old faithful” and turn in your reports on time and bring solutions, not just problems, but I wonder if all that comes off a bit grating. “Oh look, JcWoman is writing that stupid report again, who even reads those” or “Yes, that is a problem, and that is a solution, but it’s not a problem I care about nor is it a solution that’s worth the time to implement”. I have seen a lot of developers that got stuck on “the right thing” to the exclusion of “the quick thing” or “the cheap thing” or “the best thing”. Sometimes it pays to be a stickler, sometime you need to take on technical debt to get something out the door, sometimes you have to understand a problem is going to stick around because the solution costs more than keeping the problem around. I’m sure the boss praises you for wanting to do the right thing, but I wonder if they privately wish you would keep it to yourself sometimes.
And last, I think you’re taking the promotion thing too seriously. It’s pretty normal in software to get your promotion by changing companies. Not to mention many times the company structure is “grunt, manager, grand poobah” and if you don’t need another manager everyone stays at the grunt level no matter how good they are.
I also see a lot of “well, I don’t know that because I haven’t done a project in that tech” which is an instant downer for most managers. There’s some amount of keeping your skills sharp that you are responsible for no matter what project you’re on. If you’ve been in software for 20 years and are still in the “barely write a decent where clause in SQL”, that’s a huge problem even if you’ve never been a DBA. It’s just an expected skill to have gained over time. I would guess that a lot of your projects are “I was assigned this and did only that” rather than “I was assigned this, but make it extra better by thinking about big picture stuff and gaining more skills along the way”. People don’t get promoted by being good at their job, they get promoted for showing that they would be good at the next job.
Yellowjacketcoder has it I think. After 30 years of computer work I feel like I finally figured it out, too late.
Imagine you’re a manager, perhaps maybe only an average or mediocre manager like so many are, and you have job to fill. This is a person you will need to interact with and get along with for years. Do you want the friendly person who everyone likes or the person who hides in his cubicle with his head down who may or may not be friendly? I was the latter. Late in my career I learned that bashfulness is often interpreted as being ‘stuck up’ and nobody wants to work with someone like that.
Yellow Jacket Coder said it better than I ever could. He’s applying it to an IT career; but the same things are true in any industry I’ve worked in - retail, engineering, construction, the restaurant industry.
Well, when asking for ticks you might notice, what is your voice-tone like? Voice is actually a lot of how we are perceived in person to person interactions and sometimes unfortunate voices give the wrong impression.
Sometimes, women who assert themselves do so without tact or leadership skills. Not always. But I’ve seem women speak over people, cut them off, overrun them, belittle them etc, and later complain that an assertive woman is called a bitch while an assertive man is respected. Ignoring that a man who asserted himself in a similar way would have gotten a bloody nose in elementary school. Or if to physically imposing, would be called a bully and an asshole.
This is not most women, and I am not basing it on any knowledge of you or your posting history. But it is a social error that crop up sometimes, and since you asked for tips or hints I thought it worth mentioning.
Finally, you speak a lot about your skills, experience and work. How much do you participate in the social jostling for promotion?
Good thoughts. My voice is somewhat lower than average and soft. In general (not just workplace) I’m perceived as a bit timid because of that, but I’m assertive when I need to be. Over my career I’ve polished a fairly professional mien and don’t get rattled too easily. I don’t talk over people unless they interrupt me first. I’m pretty well socialized with men after years in a male-dominated college program and then a male dominated career. Part of that means that I don’t get easily offended or “read between the lines” looking for offense like many women do. But if anything, I’m awkward with women and very possibly don’t socialize with them enough or properly.
I’ve never seen any social jostling for promotion. Seriously, is that something that happens?
It probably happens more so in industries than mine, but yes, it does happen.
For example – and this is probably the worst of the best example – there’s a reason behind why a “brown noser” is a brown noser.
There’s a reason why some people are considered more “competitive” in the workplace arena than others.
I’ve had coworkers over the years who were demoted for not having a “politically attractive” personality. They were the quiet ones who mostly toiled away on the mundane tasks nobody else wanted to do. They were too inhibited for whatever reason to speak up for fear of losing their jobs. In my industry people like them are indispensable. As long as they keep doing what they’re doing their more competitive/assertive coworkers can run circles around them and play the game so they can be promoted.
I’ve played the management game and have no desire to do so ever again so I’ve willingly become one of those quiet sorts. As long as I get a paycheck and an annual raise, I’m happy. I’m too old for all that stuff, LOL.