Use Your Year-End Review to Reach for a Promotion

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Hard work rarely speaks for itself. When I landed my first job as a software engineer, I had a simple plan: Work hard and somebody would notice. Eventually a manager would tap me on the shoulder and hand me a promotion (probably with a nice little speech). That plan stalled my career for about five years. I switched jobs twice, kept my head down, read a stack of programming books, and sometimes pulled 12-hour days. I was never promoted.