I got my job promotion to a manager in the year 2017. As a manager, I was given new responsibilities and I have mastered them all over the years. I am one of the top performers in my department and my peers recognizes that I am operating at a higher level.
This month, we will be getting our bonuses and promotion. The disappointing news is that I am not getting any job promotion. People who recently joined my company have a higher job title and those that started later than me have also been promoted. I have talked to my boss about it but did not obtain a satisfactory answer.
Below are some things that I have learnt.
A job done well in a corporate world doesn’t guarantee a promotion
Doing your job well or even doing more work than the others does not necessary guarantee you a job promotion. I have worked longer hours and put in extra effort than the others but it does not guarantee you success.
However, the extra effort put in does help me build up my work experiences. You learn more by doing more.
You have to take your own charge of your career
There are always options out there to take yourself to a higher level. We should never put the responsibility of our career development on our bosses. If your boss have no career plans for you, you may never get the job promotion you wanted.
One thing I have learnt is that we have to continue to learn and uplift our skills so that we can stay relevant and valuable to the job market.
Always keep your resume updated and lookout for good positions out there in the job market.
Do not over rely on your job
We all know that higher responsibilities command a higher salary. What if you never gotten the higher job role you wanted?
That is where having an alternative or passive income matters. Start investing right now if you have not started. You can also start a side hustle if you have any brilliant ideas.
Life is never fair
I wrote the same thing last year. When we worked, the goal is not to be recognized or to be rewarded, the goal is to be VALUABLE. Because when you are valuable, the recognition and rewards will come naturally!
Here’s what I learned in corporate life.
– If you are working like a loony, putting in long hours and getting stuff sorted for your boss, then he won’t promote you because he would then need to find a replacement for you. That is a headache he doesn’t want. You are doing too much.
– If your boss has reached his “Peter” level, or is generally not interested in climbing further up the ladder, then you are also stuck at the same level.
– to get promoted you need to find a potential sponsor or two further up the hierarchy above your boss, or in another hierarchy. These are the ambitious guys who rarely stay at a job for more than a couple of years before they move up a rung or two. These are the guys that can pull you up.
– To get promoted it is not about YOU making yourself look great, it is all about making your BOSS look great. You may hate him, detest him, want to undermine him, but these are all negative strategies. Find out what his REAL concerns are and work to solving them. The rewards will come.
Write down the company hierarchy and pinpoint the potential sponsors. Home in on these guys, find out their interests, strengths and weaknesses. Do some research so you can chat to them about their interests.
If you present company doesn’t seem to offer the opportunities, then you look outside.
And remember Pareto. Get 80% of the job done with 20% of your effort, and spend the other 80% of your time working on a strategy to get up the hierarchy. That is called efficiency.
Putting in more time and effort than others to just do your job, hoping for recognition, is recognised as and called inefficiency……
You can thank me with your next promotion.
I don’t know you so I can’t assess your situation but I ran a large corporation and I can give you senior management’s perspective. If you feel you deserve a promotion but lesser talents are passing you by then there are only a few possible explanations. One is there is an internal political system that exists that is dishing out favoritism for reasons beyond your control. They are promoting friends or the children of friends or they have a bias against you for some non work related reason. If that’s the case then its really bad luck and you should find another job where that twisted logic isn’t being applied to good workers. Also possible is that they are valuing job skills and performance using different metrics than you. You may be judging your value on specific work tasks you have mastered but they may be grading you more on how well you work in a team or on how much your coworkers trust and enjoy working with you. It is worth putting some effort into finding out if this is the case. If you can befriend someone on your level or better yet, someone on your bosses’ level and get them to frankly tell you why they think you’ve not promoted more, it might be revealing. Maybe you have an unknown enemy at work or maybe your accomplishments haven’t been adequately advertised to the decision makers. But if you intend to stay there you need information so you can attack the real problem. You could just leave but if the problem is in something you are or are not doing then leaving won’t fix that. It would be nice to try to isolate the reasons your career is going more slowly than you feel you deserve. Because with knowledge there is the power to attack those reasons head on. Good luck, and don’t just accept this, investigate it and put together a plan that will get you where you want to be either at this company or another.
Hi,
There are always options elsewhere.
I have been overlooked for promotion many many time during my (almost 18.5 years) fledging career (Dec 2000 to 30 April 2018). I overcame such shortfall by changing jobs, thereby increasing the remuneration along the way. Just for sharing.
WTK