At every job I go to, I seem to plateau at barely above entry level and my colleagues don’t take me seriously, coupled with them being on average ten years younger.
Have I not just found the right job yet? Or is it something else? I’ve never been promoted to a management position ever, I’m kind of resenting not getting anywhere career wise.
Promotion and success have to be earned. How is your job performance? I always got ahead (to the extent that I did) by being better than anyone else at what I did, and also doing extra without being asked.
My social anxiety worked against me being popular with a lot of co-workers, but I was almost universally popular with my bosses.
It’s going to be hard to give you specifics without really knowing you. There are lots of reasons. To be promoted into management, you have to have a lot of people skills. It’s just just a “you’re doing better” promotion. You have to have the skills to interact with people in a constructive way, encourage them to produce in the direction that benefits the company, etc. You have to be popular in some sense since so much of your work will be with dealing with people.
I’ve worked with people who felt they deserved to be promoted simply because they had been around for a while. That’s not exactly how it works. You typically have to be excelling at your job to the point that you are at the top range of coworkers or have some skills that would be more useful at the high level.
For instance, someone who’s great at being a phone rep may only rise the level of being the top phone rep. They won’t necessarily be promoted to management since being a manager is a different skill set than a phone rep. But if a phone rep (even an average one) has lots of skills dealing with their coworkers, is great about interacting with management, has ideas on how things can run better, etc., then they may get promoted to management since they are demonstrating abilities which would be useful at the manager level.
One way or another, I think you should shop around for a better job.
What kinds of jobs have you been working, and how long, roughly, do you work each job? (You don’t need to give specific calendar dates, but … we talkin’ several week? Coupla months? A year at each?)
Does this mean in terms of your titled position, or your skills/talents/abilities?
Why do you think that is so?
Not why do you feel that is so - I’ll take your word for it that this is what you’re experiencing.
But what’s going on, that makes it seem like they’re mistreating you?
Are they teasing you for being the newbie? Outright hazing? Deliberately undermining you, throwing you under the bus?
Promotions are earned, not handed out after X amount of time doing the exact same thing every day.
What have you done to show that you deserve to be considered for a promotion?
Have you asked to be trained on new tasks, or taught yourself (e.g. taking a class) something new?
Do you passively react to problems using previously scriped solutions, or do you proactively search for new solutions to existing problems?
When your colleagues act in ways you don’t like (such as not taking you seriously) how do you react?
I can’t keep doing that until I’m 50, the longest time I’ve been at one job was five years and at that one I was heavily bullied towards the end.
But at the current job, my manager doesn’t delegate important jobs to me and I’m left doing the overflow or having training pushed back because they never have enough time to train me, I’ve worked for my brother and friend before and I always seem to be left out in their group dynamics.
Eh I’m frustrated which is affecting my articulation of the problem I have
Does your current job have opportunities for continuing education? I’m thinking short courses on leadership or administration or supervising…
If not (small organizations typically don’t) then are there opportunities (reviews) to tell your supervisors/management that you are wanting to learn more about managing people and make it clear that you want to move into a managerial role? So they can give you some learning opportunities in your current role.
You have to both communicate your desires AND be seen putting the work in to develop your skills in management areas.
Tell us what field you are in. Each one has their own artificial barriers. For example if you are in corporate security, you are pretty much not going to be on a career track unless you are former police/military.
Increase your value to the company.
Specifics about what the company does and your role within the company would help, if you’re willing to ‘go public’ with those.
But, as a general rule, you get farther by being more valuable to the organization, and by letting them see it and telling them about it – often in the form of asking for a raise or promotion, and telling them exactly how you’ve earned it.
Gaining new skills, taking on new responsibilities, increasing revenue or decreasing costs, coming up with a big idea (preferably that either increases revenue or decreases cost), being the kind of person about whom your co-workers have only universally positive things to say …
They never really include me in any conversation asking for advice, and are always interjecting with explanations.
You can’t react if you’re a guy, you have to let it slide off your back lest you’re showing a vulnerability
This seems like a red flag to me. There are a lot of ways for any person to react to the specific behaviors you describe. You can politely butt into a conversation if you have something useful to add. I’m not sure what “interjecting with explanations” means here, but if they are interrupting you there are civilized ways to deal with that too. None of these responses has anything to do with gender, I would expect any woman to behave in exactly the same way as a man in a work environment.
By all means, let insults roll off your back (again, nothing to do with being a guy) when that works to your advantage. It’s requires good judgment to know when something that someone else says to you or about you requires more than that. I think your best bet is to find yourself a mentor, ideally at work but if not, outside of work, someone wiser than you, who is willing to work with you to improve your interpersonal skills and your reactions so that you won’t be sidelined by people you work with.
How do you know how much you SHOULD be worth to what company? Are you able to objectively assess that you bring more worth to the job tan you are being valued? Are you doing something you KNOW you are really good at, or are you pursuing jobs you want to be perceived as good at and compensated highly?
Not trying to be mean. But we aren’t in Lake Woebegon (where everyone is above average.)
Have you considered sitting down with your supervisor and asking what you need to do to be considered for a management position?
What. Do. You. Do?
This^
I have experience both getting promoted and being the manager promoting, but strictly in engineering/scientific organizations, so take the following with that grain of salt.
Are you in a healthy organization with room for promotion? If there are promotion opportunities and the organization itself is healthy, then the question you are asking is appropriate. If the organization is stagnant or dysfunctional, then the appropriate question may be the one suggested earlier in the thread, “How do I get out of this job and into a better one?”
If there are opportunities and you aren’t getting a chance, then by all means, sit down with your manager and ask the question “What can I do to be a prime candidate for promotion?”
Don’t ask what you need to do to get promoted! No decent manager is ever going to promise a promotion “if you do x and y and z”.
Listen to your boss! Even if your boss sets out some criteria you think you meet, just listen and go off and reflect on why the boss doesn’t see that you already meet or exceed some or all of the criteria before going back with a case of your own.
Look around at who gets promoted and try to figure out what they are doing different than you. In a healthy organization, brown nosing is never the top reason for promotion, so spend some time on this,
Then figure out what you can change about yourself to be more aligned with promotability. For example, if you feel excluded from important conversations that would allow management to take notice of you, what can you do to be included? Is it the way you present yourself? Is it as simple as asking (nicely) to be included? Do you shine more in one on one interactions than groups? (then maybe don’t try to get into the group conversation but have some side conversations with key people).
There is a truism that to get promoted, you need to demonstrate that you can do the job you want to be promoted into. While not strictly true, showing that you have the capabilities and attitude necessary for the next level is important. Take opportunities for tasks that may be outside your normal job (and may require extra work) if they give you a chance to show some of the key attributes of the next level. I used to tell engineers that the key common attribute I looked for in considering promotions was leadership (not management) and that it didn’t have to be leadership with a capital L, just taking the opportunities to take the lead in team situation.
A final anecdote on “being included”. In 1990 I joined a new research organization. I was heavily recruited and given responsibility for managing a big (for research) program.
I was doing a good job (both my own assessment and feedback from management). But I noticed that when meetings with top management or important, high ranking customers happened, I was usually not invited to sit in. I could have complained, or stewed about it, but that’s not my nature.
I reflected on what I was doing or not doing that might explain what might not even be a conscious exclusion. As I thought back over the past month or so, I realized that the majority of my peers (and managers) that ended up in these meetings generally dressed every day in a coat and tie (hey, it was the early 90’s, that was the management culture). I also noticed that a lot of the important meetings I wasn’t invited to were meetings that just sprung up during the day. Again, I could have complained or stewed about the injustice of corporate culture over engineering excellence, but instead I went out and bought a couple of cheap sportscoats and ties, and started showing up at the office every day dressed in them. I started to get pulled into the meetings, where I could be part of the conversation and shine (I’m a smart cookie, it wasn’t hard).
I eventually became one of the guys that got tapped to be the sole representative of the research group in some of the meetings. While this didn’t lead directly to a promotion, it was a big factor in being a prime candidate the next time a promotion opportunity came along.
Bottom line: You can’t really change anyone but yourself. It may not be fair, but to rise, sometimes you need to make some changes, Sometimes the changes are trivial but important and you need to decide if they are worth it.
If you answer that, we could probably help.
Yep. Huge range of responses based on job:
If we don’t know what you do, how can we help?
This advice works for pretty much any industry.
If the O.P. has done this, and still isn’t getting promoted, then yeah, we’re gonna need to know more. But if the O.P. hasn’t done this (yet) then really, it should be the first step.
Promotions don’t just magically happen, and they aren’t awarded just cuz you want one.
Construction sales
Not every one is going to get promoted to management, not even if they would be good at it . It’s kind of a numbers problem - lets say your company has 10 sales people assigned to each sales manager. There’s no way for everyone to become a manager , not even switching companies because the same issue applies, just larger. There’s 1000 sales people and 100 managers and everyone still will not become a manager.
Many jobs don’t really have anything between entry level (whatever that means for your field) and supervisor/manager. Some jobs have Widget Maker 1 through 4 and you can get promoted from 1 to 2 , earn more money and do more interesting work. There is not necessarily any limit on how many people get promoted to Widget maker 2. At other jobs , everyone might start shampooing dogs and move up to cutting hair and performing pedicures. (just an example, I don’t actually know how this works). At still other jobs, everybody comes in with a particular title and over time they may get raises or be assigned more interesting work without their title ever changing until/unless they are promoted to a supervisory or management job. For example, a custodian might be assigned to larger buildings and have a pay increase while keeping the same title. If your job is the last sort of job, you may never move above “entry level” , not even if you work the same sort of job for 40 years.
You have to figure out which kind of job you are in to determine whether it’s a problem that you haven’t been promoted or if it just goes along with that sort of job.