You’ve paid your dues and now you’re ready for the next challenge in your career, but how do you get your manager to see that? Many professionals assume that hard work and dedication will naturally and automatically lead to a promotion, but in reality, there’s so much more involved. Here are some ways you can be proactive and forward-thinking in your quest to get your next promotion.
1. Conduct an honest self-evaluation
Before approaching your manager or HR rep about any possibility of a promotion, run a thorough examination of your own work performance, including your record with completing projects on time, overall work ethic, and how well your manager(s), colleagues, and other major stakeholders (clients, customers, vendors, etc.) perceive you. Are there areas that you have been lacking or underperforming in? Are there areas that require improvement or are there knowledge gaps that need to be filled? Often we can get lost in the desire or sense of entitlement for a promotion that we may lose sight of whether or not we’ve actually demonstrated that we have earned it. Be honest with yourself in your self-assessment in order to accurately determine if you are rightly due a promotion. If you find any shortcomings, focus your energies on filling those gaps first.
2. Track and quantify accomplishments
When you have your discussion about why you deserve a promotion, you want to be able to support your argument with facts and evidence of what you’ve already achieved in your current role. Collect and collate your accomplishments and have this prepared in advance so that you can speak of specific milestones and cite examples to support your reasoning for why you deserve a promotion. By documenting and demonstrating your professional successes, and your impact on the company and/or business, you’ll be far more likely to get that promotion than if you went in unprepared.
3. Take advantage of training and education programmes
According to CareerBuilder, a whopping 68% of companies offer some sort of in-house training programme for their employees and 40% send their employees back to school for advanced degrees. If your company offers this benefit, look into the learning options available to you. With this formal education, not only will you be staying ahead of industry trends that can help position you well for a promotion in the future, it will also look great on your resume should you decide to take your career to another organisation.
4. Create your own promotion
Often overlooked is the opportunity to create a role for yourself by identifying a strategy gap within your organisation that needs to be filled. Once you single out this new position, work on creating a proposal outlining the need and your qualifications to meet those needs for management to review. Even if the new position doesn’t get approved, your initiative, creative problem solving skills, and value to the company will get noticed and may set you up well in the future when the right opening does comes along.
