We are closing in on the end of 2023. That means I am about to pour a dump truck of money into Jeff Bezos’s pockets for Christmas toys, and everyone is trying to think about next year’s career growth. I mean, I hope you are thinking about that and not just waiting all thirsty-like for your end-of-year bonus.
Do not get me wrong. It is nice to get that annual bump. Ultimately, if you want to get paid moar, you should think a bit more about the total package. When you are working for a public company, you probably have some Tweetable percentage of your income coming in the form of stock grants, and if you hit the two-year mark of employment, you should be prepared for that to be re-upped. Otherwise, I would work on that resume dot doc file and find out if the marketplace agrees with your employer on total net worth.
You might be raising your eyebrows here because so much of what I do for a living focuses on employee retention. Why am I telling you to consider testing the market for a cash upgrade?
That is a great question. Allow me to play Devil’s advocate to myself… while… playing Devil’s advocate to myself? Maybe that is a little too cerebral.
The end of the year is an important time to reflect on what you are getting as a total package for your time-in-role and efforts for your employer. And if you are unsatisfied with it, then you should ask yourself what needs to change.
Are you paid competitively for your role? Are you doing the right work to begin with? Is what you are doing now going to help you for “2028 You”? These are some important questions to ask yourself and presumably your manager.
If you do not have good answers here, and neither does your manager, maybe now is the time to explore getting a mentor. They might tell you that your cheddar looks “mighty fine” and that it is not a great time to be out pounding the pavement for some new nine-to-five digs.
If you are not really sure you can get paid better, then maybe the right answer is to skill up and get promoted from your current role.
So, how does one get promoted?
There are two paths to promotion. There are step-function role promotions in accordance with a promotions ladder according to some internal rubric. This is one of those things you find at bigger companies. Many companies maintain a published hierarchy of titles and roles for their various disciplines. Engineer, Senior Engineer, Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, and Staff Engineer are examples of a hierarchy of roles. Maybe they chose to stretch it out into four times as many titles by adding a Roman numeral at the end, and you need to go from Senior Engineer II to Senior Engineer III. These are reasonable career progressions to consider and generally include a slight bump in pay. The title matrix is usually much smaller at a startup and may not exist formally… yet.
At that point, you might ask yourself if there is a promotion to a different work style. For Individual Contributors (ICs) you might ask yourself if a management role is right for you.
This gets a lot trickier. Rather than a step function increase in your current responsibilities, you might need to make some transcendent changes to how you do things. Managers of ICs behave differently than ICs, and Managers of Managers behave differently than those two.
This is where coaching and mentoring help. Some companies possess progression plans for their teams and staff to support career growth. They may establish some goals and objectives for you to develop effectiveness in your new role and work with you to get there. It is tough to put a timetable on this. Speaking for myself, I have yet to progress along a given path to a promotion. I tended to have my head down and push on a particular set of problems until there was a human-sized hole in the organization created by attrition. About half the time, I would throw my hat in the ring to fill that hole. The other half of the time, someone would come to me and ask me to step into that role because it was urgent to fill it, and it was credible for me to do that work based on prior successes.
Working into a new role at an existing employer is a great way to level up professionally and generally includes some financial upside. If you are not experiencing a financial step up from this exercise, you should chalk it up as a win in the learning column of the “you are either learning or earning” fortune cookie mantra. After enough time-in-role, if your pointy-haired boss does not reward you for having more responsibility, you can use that to negotiate a new role at Not Working Here Anymore! I have always counseled people to avoid side-grades when looking at new opportunities. This is one of those rare times that I think that it makes sense.
So, let’s recap.
The end of the year is a good time to figure out if you are “earning or learning.”
A mentor is a valuable tool if you and your boss keep shaking a Magic Eight Ball to figure out what next year looks like.
Avoid career side grades.
And finally, John’s American Express card is about to get abused for Christmas.
Thank you for reading along. I posted yesterday to LinkedIn about Epic’s plans for item trading in Rocket League and why it makes me sadge. A pile of people from the web3 space started following me after that post. If you are one of those people, welcome to my blog! Yes, you are probably wondering why the hell I went from web3 to career management. That happens here—a lot. In the coming weeks, I also want to talk about how my most beloved video game design credit was earned doing a thing that I despise as a player. The storytelling is part of my therapy.
See you all soon!
