I (26F) have been in my position for 3.5 years. I had my first baby a little less than a year and a half ago and it’s been about a year now since I returned to work from maternity leave.
This past year has been difficult financially because of inflation and the economy. Rent has more than doubled and we tried to make a one bedroom apartment work as long as we could but even that was expensive and just not feasible with a baby. Other bills and groceries have doubled as well. And I have medical bills from the birth and from both my husband and son having to go to the ER. It took me three years at my current job to make 12% more than I was when I got hired because my company took away raises during the pandemic. That’s not horrible, I guess, but it’s not keeping up with the cost to live. It’s to the point where I’ve had to get a second job or do gigs on the side to make ends meet.
Because of all this I knew I needed to increase my income. I didn’t think I was entitled to a promotion or anything over my coworkers just because I have a baby and need money. But the reality is I needed the money so I knew I would need to work hard for a promotion.
My workload already increased by like 50% before I left for my maternity leave and I continued to take on even more work on top of that once I came back. I thought if I showed initiative and willingness to take on a little extra work, my boss would see I could handle more and promote me.
So I increased my workload. I took on some of the responsibilities that the seniors normally do. When we transitioned to another system I took the lead and was the one to communicate with our vendors and clients. I pick up the phone and call clients. I work with another team that my team helps and personally work on time sensitive tasks for them. I helped one of the other teams we work with create procedures based on our new system because I was pretty much the only one who knew how to use it. I trained ANOTHER new colleague. My boss had requested in my performance review that I start to take on ad hoc requests and work on other cases that aren’t normally part of my job.
So I did that and now I process a lot of other random work, and know how to do many other processes that nobody else on my team knows how to do. I have a 60 page document of procedures I created and I usually have the answer to any question that anyone can ask about almost any case at this point. None of this is in my job description but I do it anyway. On top of that, I kept up on my normal functions. I usually split that work with two other men in the same position as me, but they often would ignore cases that require too much work so I would go back and do them. I didn’t want the cases to get left behind and hurt our team or upset our clients. So I ended up processing 50% of that work too instead of the 1/3 that I’m supposed to. And I didn’t make a single mistake this year. Performance-wise this was my best year yet and all while being a new mom with so many sleepless nights.
Before my performance review I made sure to write all of this down to bring up with my boss. I did just that and I let him know that I wanted to be promoted this year and grow my career. In his review of me, he basically confirmed everything that I said I do above. And he told me that I’m ready to start learning some of the senior functions. My performance was rated at “meets”instead of “exceeds.” So I asked my manager why I didn’t receive an “exceeds” rating and what it would take to get there on my next performance review and he could hardly come up with a reason and just said that he thinks he needs to recommend me the next time our auditor has a project she needs help with. And then he let me know that raises were reduced this year due to the economy and I would be getting a 2% raise. It felt like a slap in the face but I kept working hard anyway. I did meet with a career coach though who told me I’m underpaid. And my husband told his boss about my situation and he said I’m SEVERELY underpaid for what I do. At this point his boss has been a better mentor for my career than my own manager.
I kept following up with my manager to ask when I would begin training and he kept saying “next month.” In case he was too busy to give the green light on training, I told the seniors that our manager said I was ready to start training on senior functions so that maybe they could push for that to start. They would continuously complain about how their workloads were too much and so I would offer to learn whatever they are able to delegate to me. It did work with a few small tasks but mostly nothing happened and they kept complaining about how they do too much.
Pt 2 in comments
Tl; dr: My lazy, less-qualified coworker got promoted to senior instead of me even though my manager said I would be learning senior duties soon. What do I do?