In this post, I’ll discuss how companies view career progression and what the implications are for managing your career.

In the past, you may have benefited from your company actively managing your career. Today, fewer companies are managing individual careers, for good reason – the return on investment is low due to higher turnover. When employees feel like they are not progressing as fast as they want, they look elsewhere.

Let’s start by figuring out what career opportunities exist within your company.

How Companies View Career Management

Internally, companies define career progression by positions, titles, or levels within a company. When you are hired into a company, ask your boss or Human Resources representative to share career path information for your discipline.

Let’s say you were hired as an engineer, the career path might look like this:

In this example, there are two different career paths available to you. The first career path focuses on engineering management, the other career path on research. Both career paths lead to an Engineering Director role.

One of the key differences between these two career paths is that the management path requires strong people and project management skills while the other engineer path focuses on exceptional technical or research skills.

At some point, your manager may have a conversation with you about which career path you want to focus on – there is no right or wrong answer. Choose the path that most interests you, because you are more likely to excel in what you love to do! However, be aware that your choice may limit your career projection.

Both engineering paths lead to becoming an Engineering Director, however, a successful Director candidate requires strong communication, people management skills and technical competency.

Within a position, companies define the level of skills required to do the role or job. They rarely manage each employee’s individual career progression on skills because the process becomes more complex. It is easier for companies to focus on positions – until it’s time to make a decision on whom to hire!

Have you have seen or worked for someone who had the technical know-how yet was a terrible people manager or visa versa? When companies fail to consider the underlying skills of employees; promotions can result in the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle occurs when people are promoted into jobs with duties they cannot do or do well.

Traditional Career Progression

Traditional career paths focus on the position you are in and what higher level position your company has available – often called a promotion.

Promotions within companies are becoming less frequent because there are fewer positions. You may feel that your career is stalled in the professional level, especially after 5-10 years.

In the engineering example above, new hire engineers may be promoted within the professional level every couple of years; however once your next promotion is into the managerial level, the number of available positions (n) narrows significantly.

Lateral Moves

One of the easiest ways to keep up career development without a promotion is to take a different position in your current company.

The lateral move is career path option that is often discounted. When you take a position that is at the same level as your current position but has different responsibilities, you have made a lateral move within your company.

For example, the engineer who decided to take the technical career path may opt to cross over to the engineering project management path. This opportunity advances the engineer’s skills that are sought after at a Director level position.

While taking a lateral move may feel like a set back, it does improve your employment and promotion marketability.

When a company has confidence in you and your capabilities, they are more willing to invest in your training and development – that is a win-win solution!

Reconciling what you want to do with your career vs. what you have to do with your career today is a stressful process. The reason you get so stressed out is because you either don’t believe you have to change or close friends keep telling you…just stay the course, something will work out. Yet, still you wait and nothing happens.

Here are some signs that you need to rethink your career management approach:

You continue to be the runner-up with interviews.

Getting a job interview is not a problem with your job search efforts. It is the fact you never get the job offer and are always the runner-up. If you have interviewed for the same kind of position more than a dozen times and you continue to get those rejection notices – a pattern is developing. If you continue to see a pattern, it’s time for you to re-examine what you think you can do vs. what the decision makers see you doing in the workplace.

Promotions continue to elude you at work.

Many companies have internal job postings to create a fairer process for promotional considerations. Ultimately, the hiring manager still has the last call about who is selected to work on their team. Even if your company does not have a job promotion system in place, sometimes getting to that next level seems impossible.

You may believe your career goals are clear and that you have the qualifications to be promoted, but the promotion just doesn’t happen.  When you find yourself at a career crossroads, it’s time to rethink your options and develop a plan to get where you want to go…or accept your fate of staying where you at in your career.

You’ve started your own business and getting clients is difficult.

The reason you may not be getting clients to buy your services or products is because they don’t believe you can help them or see you as an expert in that field. No one wants to engage a generalist when they can get a specialist.

You don’t know what your value proposition is.

This is a tough one because perception plays a role in knowing your value proposition.  Sometimes what we want to do and what we think is our value to others is not what their perceive it to be.

What career management solution is right for you?

If the signs point to your career management needing an overhaul, here are some potential solutions that may put you back on track.

1. Your image or personal brand needs repackaging
2. Ask your customers for specific feedback
3. Define your specialist niche
4. Invest in training or development to become an expert
5. Develop a long-term plan for changing perceptions
6. Reassess if your company and career are a good match with one another
7. Determine if you are in the right professional or technical field

Finding your productive career management path is hard work – career success rarely happens on its own. When you are more deliberate about developing and executing your plan, career success becomes easier to meet.

This is a true story about an independent recruiter who wanted to make a career change and work for a company full-time. Over the years, he had successfully completed credentialing as a SPHR and wanted to shift his career to a Human Resources role.

He kept his eye out for some opportunities in his vast network. You are probably thinking – what’s the problem, he’s in the business of matching up people – he should land quickly in the HR career field.

His first interview was with a local company. It was for an HR Manager with heavy recruiting experience.  A couple of days before the interview, his family got some Chinese takeout.

Everyone got sick except for him. They figured it was food poisoning and he was lucky to get a piece of chicken that was not tainted. Without thinking, he had some more of that food the night before the interview and now he was experiencing the aftermath.

He managed to hold it together during the interview though admittedly he was not at his best. Ultimately, the company decided to promote from within for the HR position.

The second interview was with an out-of-state company. It was an internal recruiting job that would allow him to set up a home office and work remotely. This opportunity sounded like the dream job.

The company invited him in to interview and he left one morning to catch the 7 am flight. The only problem is he missed the flight by 5 minutes despite being at the small airport an hour early.

The last interview was with a local company as a Recruiting Manager. On the day of the interview, he mixes up his pain and muscle relaxer medication. The kicker is he took twice as much muscle relaxer medication than he normally takes. You can probably visualize how that interview went.

So, now he is asking himself if he really wants to make a career change and become a permanent employee inside a company. Is there some greater force of nature at work? Is the universe telling him no or it is self-sabotage?

What are your thoughts?

Lately, I have heard from and work with more people who are working and are not satisfied with their career progression. Here’s one example where a young professional was stalled in her career.

This young professional is a 10+ year employee who is not being considered for promotional opportunities but is continually asked to train others to take over her boss’s position.

She approached me because it had become clear that the company was not going to promote her and she believes she is ready for more responsibility. She was very unhappy and knew it was time to make a change.

What are her alternatives? A situation like this is not always clear-cut and requires some discussion to pull out all the facts. Here are some the questions that I asked her that you should ask yourself:

1. What has her performance been rated as? Is it documented?
2.  Does the company or her boss give constructive feedback?
3. What kind of training has she done to advance her skill sets?
4. Does she have a development plan in place?
5. Does she have an internal advocate, mentor or confidante?
6. What kinds of conversations have others had with her about her career progression?
7. What is the company’s philosophy on employee development?
8. Is she being given assignments that test and stretch her skill sets?
9. How does the company culture impact career progression or promotions?
10. Are job progression paths defined?
11. Does the company have a succession planning process?
12. What kind of activities, behaviors or things is she doing that need to stop (otherwise known as career limiting behaviors?)
13. What kind of activities, behaviors or things does she need to start doing?
14. What kind of activities, behaviors or things does she need to continue doing?
15. Is educational or other credentialing inhibiting her career progression?
16. Can she fix it?

The list could go on…in fact, share your favorite thought-provoking question!

While the background of this situation may differ from your own, my experience is that many of these same questions apply because it is important to understand the big picture. Individual details represent only part of the equation.

It is important to figure out if you are reason career progression has stalled or if the company or its culture is just not aligned with your expectations. Let’s be honest, stalled career progression is often a mixture of both.

There are several approaches and things you can do to increase career progression opportunities. However, the main decision is to decide to stay or go. Your answer defines the priorities and what to do next.

If you stay, the bottom line is you will have to act, behave and do things differently. Remember the adage – if continue to do the same thing – you will get the same results. What to change may be include you skills, political astuteness, relationship building, or possibly increasing your self-promotion.

If you decide to go, the biggest challenge is not to repeat the same mistakes or to let your current company experience unduly influence your next career move.

Don’t blow your opportunity to assess a new company during the interview and selection process. Successful company searches require careful preparation of interview questions and research.

One of the ways my clients understand the areas to explore more fully during their interviews uses the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) assessment process. Your individual HBDI results enable you to devise a balanced interviewing approach by pin pointing the questions that may not be traditionally asked – yet are the deal killers for your career progression.

So if you find your career floundering, think about what changes you can make to put it back on the right track. If you something worked for you – what was it?