Sounds like the transfer policy is simply a way to pretend to offer advancement. And to weed out anyone but the psychotically devoted.
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner.
I agree. It’s not the military, where people may really be needed over here or there from time to time.
No, but if you want to advance in some of these corporations, you need to go to where the job opening is.
The attitude of a lot of people is that they should show up to work, push some paper or whatever, and every few years get a raise and a promotion. There is also the matter of actually being able to do the higher level job.
Take the admin who gets an MBA for example. That’s great that she got the degree and that should open more doors. But she’s not suddenly qualified to manage a department with a degree and years of taking phone calls and submitting expense reports.
I think that’s true at any employer that has more than one location. If your employer only has locations in the NYC area, maybe moving from one location to another means a 30 minute difference in your commute rather than moving your whole family. Sure , sometimes you can wait a few extra months or years until there’s an opening in your location - or maybe due to other policies there will never be an opening in that location. I worked for a state agency and people from all around the state would come to the NYC area for promotions because that would be where the vacancy ended up. A manager in Albany would retire, someone in that title from Brooklyn would transfer to Albany and the job to be filled was now in Brooklyn. If you were in Buffalo, you could either move to Brooklyn for the promotion or hope that someday there would be an opening in Buffalo.
Did Amazon pay for moving expenses?
Right - but how do you get the experience to manage a department if there’s no path to get there?
And it’s a mockery of “opportunity” to be encouraged to get an MBA, compelled to work years thereafter at the company due to the tuition agreement, but then to find out that once an admin always an admin never anything but an admin so there is absolutely zero chance you will ever be considered for an internal job slot outside that narrow scope.
Yep. One kid was quite enthusiastic about moving from a CA apt he shared with 3 other guys to renting a house to himself in KY, and said the expense money paid for the furniture since the cost of living was so much cheaper.
Well I think you need to move to a different department. Sales is a common one. Or project management is another path. Or you could go the typical MBA career path and get a job at a consulting firm.
I would also question if your company doesn’t support you moving into a better role with your new degree, why would someone want to stay there?
Because they don’t know that … yet.
Lots of companies say one thing and do another. While actively hiding what they really deliberately do as policy under a barrage of special-pleading excuses. not everyone , and especially not every lower-level worker is expert at reading those tea leaves accurately.
Someone at your place in your career is a past master at recognizing the actual lay of the land and adjusting your behavior and expectations accordingly. I’d be lost, at least at first.
Thanks for the clarification reflecting your personal experience. As I said, I was just reporting one person’s opinion.
I only know 2 Amazon workers - my sister’s husband’s nieces. They don’t impress me as the most advancement motivated persons, and have been performing essentially the same (horrendous IMO) work for the past decade or so.
It does seem that many people feel that they ought to be able to find the job they want to do exactly where they are living. You wanna live in the boonies - that’s fine. But don’t complain that there isn’t a “Help Wanted” sign at the closest intersection.
In my past job, there were opportunities for advancement, but they generally required the flexibility of moving. If you are a worker bee and want to be promoted to office manager, there is no guarantee that the management position in your office will open up on your timetable.
Just to be clear - I never went for an MBA at that company because I didn’t see the effort paying off in the end.
“Moving to another department” was not viable - an admin to could to another department admin position, they could move laterally, but never up. I saw it over and over again - admins who had educated themselves, got training, put extra time and effort in but any time they applied for an internal job opening at even the lowest level of management they were told no. At one point an HR person said the quiet part out loud, that they would never consider anyone hired as an admin for the company to ever be placed in a management role. They could hire someone from outside for that. It had a lot to do with corporate culture and classism.
Well, a lot of them didn’t. They waited out the years they were required to so they didn’t have to pay back tuition then went to another company. Much grumbling from HR about the futility of paying someone’s tuition only to have them go elsewhere, but still a refusal to move them up the ladder.
I was there long enough that a former admin who had gotten an MBA, gone elsewhere for awhile, then came back to apply for a manager-level opening with five years experience somewhere else. Lead candidate for the position until someone in HR looked up his job history. Found out he’d be an admin at the company five years previously and then dropped him like a hot potato. Deemed unsuitable even to consider, degree, experience, and apparently glowing recommendations notwithstanding. He’d been an admin so he couldn’t be a manager.
I put it down to corporate stupidity. And I’m not going to blame HR for that one - the decision was fully supported by the C-Suite. Waste of talent if you ask me but of course no one did. I was, after all, just an admin.
My job affords me the ability to get into the nuts and bolts of how companies actually operate. Which I think is pretty neat actually. Like my company has an internal “job board” of sorts where all the consultants are supposed to apply for available projects to get staffed on. But most of the time, the projects have already been staffed by the time they make it to the board and any project I’ve been on, I’ve already been approached directly by the client partner or worked on the proposal. So the board is mostly not useful for staffing, but I still need to make sure it’s up to date (with respect to me) so that someone looking at some dashboard somewhere doesn’t think I’m just sitting on my ass doing nothing and fire me.
That’s why they pay me the…medium bucks (for NYC) I guess.
But sure, even in the most well intentioned companies, there is how things are supposed to work and how they actually work.
I think that’s part of the rationale behind some of the “class thinking” people have described. Management and executive types tend to want to be around people who think like them and have similar experiences. They don’t want someone who would be lost navigating the organizational politics because ultimately they won’t be successful. As you rise up in management, you can’t just be a good order taker. You need to be someone who has ideas and can make them happen, often in spite of resistance.
Which I think is tough for someone like an admin who may have been previously viewed as someone who was good at executing tasks but is now technically a peer or supervisor to people who once gave her those tasks.
I used to work for a retailer where there were two classes. Stores and Corporate.
Except for situations where someone worked as a cashier or deli clerk part time while in high school, if you started your career in Stores you could not move to Corporate.
Classism is a big part of this. Corporate folks went full time 4 years to University of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, SLU, etc. then were recruited either directly from college or after (e.g. in Finance) after spending 2-4 years in Public Accounting or Consulting.
Store people got degrees from UMKC, possibly after going though community college completing a degree in seven or eight years of part time study. Some Stores people became Store Managers and District Managers, even Regional Directors or Trainers. But they’d physically be out in the stores most of the time. If they had a desk it was in the back of one of the stores.
There was one seat in the Boardroom a Store person might get to. Executive VP of Store Operations. But ironically the route to that job was via a competitor. Leave the company as a District Manager and go to a less class-bound company. Get a name brand Executive MBA (at competitor’s expense, then get hired back to your old bigger company in the executive track.
You’ve laundered your background 
Stupid, stupid, stupid. And I was one who came in through the Corporate track (via Consulting) so I was on the good side of the divide.
You could be a grade 15 Marketing Analyst and you’d have more status than a grade 19 Regional Director.
For low-level admins your summation is largely correct but I was working at the executive level serving VP’s and execs just below CEO. Admins at that level have no inherent authority yet must get people far above them in the hierarchy to do things. Sure, we “execute tasks”, but we also have to troubleshoot, be creative, and get things done despite pushback from people much, much higher in the foodchain.
The whole “oh, thye used to be subservient but now they’re a peer and that’s a problem” applies to anyone moving up the corporate foodchain, especially rapid risers. So, sorry, it’s not a valid excuse, it’s a cover for sexism, classism, racism, and other forms of bigotry.
Sitting where I was in the stratosphere of corporate life I also heard other forms of bigotry. One VP wanted to make it an HR policy that no one who had attended public schools ever be hired at any level. He didn’t want to associate with such people. Some pretty ugly stuff regarding other categories of people.
Executive admin is a hard fucking job that requires essentially a lot of project and process management, plus people, skills, among other things. I can immediately think of two people who moved from that role to bigger jobs, and who are successful…one in HR/real estate, one in procurement.
If you think about the math, it should be clear that the majority of workers at any level will not be promoted, because the next level up is much smaller. If the average manager has four direct reports, then on average you would expect only one in four employees to be promoted to manager.
What happens to the others? They stay in the job indefinitely, or they leave for a better opportunity. But in any organization, it’s a minority of workers who actually get promoted - and the rest become convinced that it’s impoasible to get a promotion or that the company is being unfair - because no one wants to admit that maybe they just aren’t as oood at their jobs as others.
In software, half the people actually doing coding are out by age 40. If they don’t move up into management, they burn out and leave the field. I was usually the oldest person on my team, and that was true when I was 40. By 50, only something like 25% of the people who started in software engineering are still writing code. Most leave the field entirely, or go into sales. A few become management. But no one is guaranteed a ladder up into management, and many won’t take it even when offered.
Exactly. How did people come to expect otherwise? I’ve never understood the “I’m due for a promotion” mindset. If you’d prefer a more senior role, odds are you’ll have to move to another organization. Nothing sinister about that.
If the roles are static. I’m sure this varies by field. Yes the team I lead only needs one me. But people who I worked with when I wasn’t leading it are leading efforts that didn’t exist back then. Both at my company and elsewhere.
Growth of course is a huge lubricant.
If a company has 4 teams of 4, and now grows to 8 teams of 4, there’s room for 4 of the 16 existing members of existing teams to become leads of the new teams. Plus of course periodic attrition or promotion of the 4 existing team leads to even higher positions or laterally off into space elsewhere in the org further frees up team lead positions for those original 16 team members to move up into.
But for companies perennially looking to trim headcount, consolidate, flatten, etc., it’s a real upstream struggle against a fast countercurrent to make any advancement, and especially advancement from the non-supervisory journeyman worker level hoping to achieve their first supervisory role.
Well, good for them at least. Amazon isn’t the first company with this policy. It used to be said that IBM stood for “I’ve Been Moved.”