A path for promotion
5 steps to get your next career promotion
Let’s start this off with a controversial theme, Parents, their children, and the school
Have you seen parents complaining that their kids aren’t receiving the necessary education at school? Or that they don’t behave correctly because of their teachers? or any other random comment to excuse themselves?
If you’re one of them… sorry but you as a parent are the only one responsible for your children's education.
The same happens for us as employees, maybe you’re complaining that you can’t grow at your current company, there is no room for improvement, that you’re the smartest person in the room, etc.,
All of these bring us to the first step towards leveling up in your career
1. You’re the only one responsible for your growth.
Don’t put your future in the hands of your manager or company. You should take time to learn new stuff, reinforce what you already know, learn from your mistakes, etc.
Take time to learn the fundamentals, and learn things agnostic to specific technologies, companies, etc since that can be transitory.
Use deep and shallow learning, if you’re a Javascript engineer, learn Javascript deeply and learn other things you might not be using more shallow like AWS, microservices, databases, and so on.
If you don’t know how to get to the next level look for a coach. It’s used in sports, you see people with personal trainers, mentors, and coaches.
The same could be applied in your professional career and get guidance to focus on the right things.
At some point, I was doing Front end stuff HTML. CSS & JS and there was no room for working on backend projects, but instead of complaining to my boss, I dedicated time to learning it and eventually landed a better job where I could use my new skill set.
2. The title is not correlated with the knowledge
Every company has a different standard of what level a Junior, Senior, etc should be.
And usually, when you get a new promotion you don’t change what you’re learning, for instance, it’s different going from Mid developer to a tech lead, or from a tech lead to an engineer manager.
So if you have been doing tasks from the next role you can aim, or if luckily the company promoted you to a particular role without you having the experience, it’s your responsibility to research, study and apply the responsibilities for that role.
I have seen many Sr Software engineers with 3 or 5 years of experience, but quite often they are Seniors because they moved between different companies so quickly that they became Senior based on the salary range they were in, instead of their skills. (At least in Costa Rica).
And they keep working as usual without doing things like mentoring Jr devs, improving the overall quality of their code, learning how to manage people, etc.
3. Challenge your own assumptions
If I ask you, do you know how to use booleans in your favorite programming language? Your answer would be yes. In the end, booleans are super simple, it’s just True or False.
So if you know how booleans work, you aren’t going to take time learning new stuff around it because you know everything. But what if I ask you, what are boolean traps? (if you don’t know read this).
The whole point is to make a conscious assessment, identify areas you can improve, and even reevaluate the things you think you know.
4. It’s not a race…
When you enroll in a race, your goal it’s to be #1.
But not at work, it’s a collaborative environment which means you can’t just pretend to grow on your own, sabotage your teammates and get the desired promotion.
This means you should talk with your team, and try to grow together, by setting a shared commitment, it can be taking a course on Fridays, learning & sharing knowledge, or asking for help & constructive feedback.
They as outsiders can point you towards areas you should improve that you might not even be aware of.
Also, it’s not running faster than the person behind you, it’s giving them a hand to overcome their challenges “Be the Senior dev you wanted as Junior”. You’d learn a lot when trying to explain things to them. Teaching is harder than you might expect.
Have you tried this and nobody got involved? Talk to your manager, and ask other members outside your team that might be interested.
5. … it’s a journey
At the end of the day, companies, roles, titles, and trendy technologies are gone, and what’s left it’s your knowledge and the relationships you make.
Since it’s a long ride, you should enjoy it to make sure you’d keep working hard, so you must start making habits for being a lifelong learner, help others along the way and surround yourself with people that go in the same direction.
To finalize, getting better in your profession is the same as being healthy, you need to measure your current shape (assess your skill set), eat healthily & work out (learn & apply the knowledge).
And at the end of the day the key to success it’s to enjoy the ride!