In roughly October of last year, the company I work for rolled out this professional development program where if you do a bunch of online learnings and pass a test, you can advance to the next “level” of your job title, resulting in a promotion and raise.
Said company is constantly putting out weird initiatives like this and then getting rid of them without a word, so I decided to go through it as fast as possible just to see if I could beat them to the punch.
I quickly found that it was designed to be difficult to complete. The learning materials weren't nicely organized all in one place, they were scattered across several different resource libraries and websites. Some of the websites required logins that hadn't been used in years and I had to reset our location's password because nobody knew it anymore. Despite the program being brand new, some of the links I was supposed to use were broken and the resources they had once led to was nowhere to be found.
The whole process is supposed to take ~12-18 months, although that time estimate is for an employee without experience to complete it. Since I've been at this job for a couple years now, it only took me 6 months. Still not fast enough. I got as far as my manager signing off saying I completed it, and now nobody knows the next step to actually, officially promote me. Not my manager, not my manager's manager, not the regional manager, not the managers of our other locations, nobody. It's unclear if corporate had even fully set up this process prior to rolling out the development program.
Then the company quietly released information about an upcoming “pre-leveling” system meant to decide the “level” of people who already have experience. Now I'm unsure if the progress I made will ever be counted, or if I'll be expected to go through the “pre-leveling” process instead.
It's been over two months since I finished it. No promotion, no raise. I wasn't really expecting anything less and I'll hopefully be able to use this as a bargaining chip in pay negotiation anyway (advice appreciated), but it's still frustrating to witness the sheer amount of corporate bullshit involved here.