Graduate Development Programs

The Best Assignment Doesn’t Win
You don’t get it! You have worked longer hours, produced better work but you still missed out on a promotion!

At university, you knew that if you achieved above a certain grade, you passed the subject and that everybody would be graded on merit.  The office is structured to promote internal competition for fewer opportunities to advance and promotion is about more than simply getting the job done. It is quite common for the metaphorical C students to be promoted over the A students.  This is not always unfair as promotion depends on multiple competencies, though certain measures are weighted more than others.

Being the smartest cookie in the cookie jar may have been enough to ace the exam or assignment, but in the office there is more to the equation than who is the smartest or who produces the best work.

Your talent is the starting point, not the selling point, because everybody else in your graduate program is also talented, all in different ways.  Talent is what got them through the selection process, just like you.  Like all competitive environments, promotions (i.e. power) must contested.

The critical factor for your career success will be relationships.  Getting the right people thinking the right things about you will be your aim.  Relationships are everything in business and as a graduate, establishing a strong network of relationships in the company is a top priority.  If you think of yourself as a one-person business, your colleagues are your customers and your relationship with them is critical for success.

Before you are overlooked for promotion, remember that producing good work on its own is not enough to get you promoted first, it is merely a starting point! You also need to cultivate productive relationships.  We will go into this further in subseuent posts by identifying stakeholders and gatekeepers  in the decision making process, as well as their sensitivities.

There are lots of outstanding documents of strategic importance sitting on shelves, gathering dust until its author moves out of the business, only for it to be polished off in 6, 12 or 18 months time and presented as a new idea.  Having good relationships will ensure your work gets noticed more often than it is shredded or even worse, ignored.

Next up, setting your timeline for a promotion.  We will explore what is a reasonable timeframe for promotion from your graduate job.

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Tags: career fast track, career success, graduate intake, promotion