K#2. I failed at getting promoted.
The do's and dont's of promotion
Hey you 👋
Welcome to this #2 edition of K’s DataLadder ✨. Each week I share a story from my life as a Tech Data Scientist to help you level up your career.
We’re already 613 🤯 and it’s thanks to readers like you, so thank you so much ❤️
Ok, enough with the useless suspense. Today, we’re talking about getting promoted.
Because being a data scientist isn’t just about doing data stuff, it’s also about thriving in your job, and it starts with learning how to navigate the corporate world.
It’s like landing on Greed Island in Hunter x Hunter, nobody got the rules until they got fucked – kudos to you if you get the ref.
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Today’s Agenda
This week’s story
The promotion process
4 tips to boost visibility
+ a free useful template
Lezgoo 👇
This week’s story
This week, I had a meeting with my manager and I asked about the possibility of pushing my promotion case for the incoming cycle.
She said no.
It’s too early, I need to upskill more with A/B testing she said.
What do you mean more? I have been doing A/B testing for a year already. Ok, I’m not an expert yet but there are a few more experienced data scientists that know less than I do on the topic. The frustration got pretty real.
At that moment, I realized getting promoted isn’t just about skills. Getting promoted is first a matter of visibility. It’s a matter of being no-ti-ced.
And I’m so bummed that it took me a year to realize that. All those wasted dollars 😔
The promotion process
Getting promoted doesn’t just happen to you
I’ve seen many people who plateaued in their jobs for years without getting promoted. But I only realized till recently what all these people had in common, something that I unconsciously replicated as well because no one told me about it: lack of visibility.
If you want to get promoted, you need to manifest interest in it and take ownership of the process. This starts with:
Figuring out what skills you need to move up to the next stage
Creating a development plan on how you intend to develop those skills
Letting your manager know of your desire to get promoted
Making sure you get assigned projects that allow you to acquire those skills
Doing your best to deliver well on those projects.
Most juniors like me usually stop at the 5th step, and that’s our mistake. Doing good work is nice but it only matters if you’re vocal about your achievements. Something I failed to do.
For context, Spotify is my first job ever, and my first time playing in the corporate world. I started my career working full remote, 100% from home. Even if Spotify has an office in Paris, no one from my team is based in France.
It’s a personal choice to live in a city where I have no colleagues and I have zero regrets. But I never expected it to be a setback in my professional growth.
What I mean is that it’s a significant reason why I didn’t pick up on the underlying rules of the corporate game sooner, but it’s not the main reason.
The reason why I actually failed to be visible
When I joined Spotify full-time, the tech job market was failing, and many people were losing their jobs, including at Spotify.
At the same time, I was fighting a chronic disease that also took a hit on my mental health. So I started blogging about my journey at Spotify, and it transformed my life. Helping people like you succeed in your careers gave me a new sense of meaning. Thank you again 🫶
I worked hard on my blog during the weekends and I did my job well, but I wasn't going the extra mile at work.
Slowly, I became an introvert because of my emotional disconnect. I didn’t make myself visible, I didn’t even know I HAD to and this cost me my promotion.
I know it’s the case for a lot of us in tech. We tend to be more introverted, but data science is not a job for the introvert. It’s a human-facing one, and it’s even more true with promotions!
4 tips to boost visibility
It took me a promotion rejection to learn it was because I didn’t “promote” myself enough. Now that I think of it, the word itself literally tells you to market yourself!
Like I always do, I brought up the topic with my colleagues and friends and asked them about their history with promotions. Everybody agreed on the same thing: visibility.
I got great advice on how to drive a promotion and I’m here to share that with you alongside actual examples of what you can do for each:
#1. Broadcast your work.
The key here is to make sure anybody remotely affected by your work is aware of it.
Make sure to showcase as much as possible your work on the communication channels of your company. Be vocal.
For us, it’s Slack. So now I try to remember (not always succeed) to share the final decks of my projects on the relevant channels to make sure that key people are aware of my contributions (and know who I am in the process, I just changed teams).
#2. Be a proactive team player.
Engage actively in your team’s activities and collaborate effectively.
Show that you’re not just present but you’re also a driving force in creating a supportive and efficient work environment.
It’s something I didn’t do enough in the past, but I’ve been doing more now:
Share more about my learnings
Participate more in advancing our ways of work
Try to volunteer to present work for the whole team
Become more active in group meetings and discussions
Be more proactive in improving the team’s internal resources
What it means in plain English: organize resources, create tutorials, manage repositories, develop templates, improve internal documentation, and suggest data-driven solutions to improve projects.
Be creative.
Something I try to do is take advantage of the fact that I’m still a junior and learning a lot. So whenever I learn a new skill or a new problem space, I document that thoroughly and make sure I share that documentation with the team.
For example, I’m one of the first ones in my team to work on the Music Video (MV) launch on Spotify. So I took the initiative to create a data guide so that my team knows how to handle MV data in the future. Then I presented the guide to them.
They truly appreciated it. Also, the recognition and feeling useful in my team made me happy.
#3. Volunteer proactively.
Volunteering proactively is something that I really struggle with.
I’m gonna be honest with you, I’m not a people-pleaser, and I struggle so much to do things that are on the ‘executive’ side of things or that I don’t really care about. I think it’s a side of my ADHD + being an ENTP, nothing about me screams wanting to get things done just for the sake of it 🥲
However, after observing those who succeeded at getting promoted, I realized that many of them often responded to calls for volunteer work. This made them more visible among senior leadership. They were sure to remember them. Makes sense!
I know now that I need to try to step up as much as I can when volunteers are needed, whether for new projects or to tackle urgent problems.
I’m not a fan of the fact that I have to do it to move up in my career, but it’s part of the game. Can’t win if you don’t play.
#4. Keep your manager updated.
The most crucial rule is to make sure your manager is aware of your initiatives.
It’s your job to let your manager know what you’re capable of because they will be the one supporting and pushing your promotion case.
My new manager didn’t know I had been doing A/B testing for a year already, so I’m putting together a document gathering all my accomplishments on this skill. That way she can follow my progress with tangible data.
One other thing I started doing in January is keeping track of all my projects in an Excel sheet. I learned this trick from my mentor and it’s amazing. I don’t know why I’ve never thought about doing this sooner (probably because I have no discipline in life whatsoever).
This helps me organize my work, assess how I’m doing skill-wise, and have something to show for in my next development talk with my manager (a bi-yearly meeting where we discuss professional progress and goals).
This works wonders for me even though I’m extremely chaotic, I often wonder how I even managed to accomplish so much in life.
In any case, I fully recommend doing the same. Here’s a free template for you 💌
Next time you’re thinking of pushing for promotion, remember to:
Be an active player in your team, not a plant like me
Be vocal about your achievements as much as possible, not a plant like me
Make sure your manager is aware of everything that you do, again not a plant like me!!!!
You get it, don’t be a 🪴. Remember the dog barking? that image lives rent-free in my head now whenever I think about promotions.
Also, If you haven’t done that already, you can:
Join the 4.6k beautiful peeps on my Medium blog
Check out my latest data science piece on how to avoid getting replaced by AI 👇
See you guys next week 👋!
Great article! 👏 Connects with a similar experience that I had. One crucial person trait that could somehow be an obstacle as you me tionned is introvercy (but could be a strength in some situations). Therefore, it's important to leverage some tips/tools as the ones that you shared. Btw, thanks for the template, really useful. Will definetly use it as a support for my 1:1 meetings with my manager.
Lil K doesn't miss. Well done and thanks a lot for the template 🫡