Im in tech at a very large multinational company. I was hired at associate level three years ago. Yep, that’s an absurdly long time to be associate. I am definitely not doing associate level work but I can’t get promoted and I feel pretty screwed over. Let me begin by saying that I will absolutely at the first opportunity dump this job, but tech is not done with layoffs and hiring freezes are still in effect at many places. It might take a bit to find something better. In the meantime, I’m stuck here and I’d like some input on the situation. Please be kind, and also, I’d love strategies to either play their games or fight back (if there is any basis).
About 1.5 years ago, my dept lead started putting together various promotion requirements. This involved completion of various certifications where the expectation was that we would not be given company time to do them. I calculated the provided estimated hours for each of the certs, which IME and everyone else I’ve talked to is extremely low, and found that it would require something ludicrous like 6 months of 40 hours per week study time unpaid and outside of work hours. In addition, at the time that I was hired I was given 60 days to onboard and complete one certification. For the last two years, all new hires were given 90 days and were onboarded in cohorts to facilitate study time. Not surprisingly, cert attainment is much higher among them.
Those of us who were hired before were not offered any additional time, and since we were more senior than the others were constantly allotted to a project team with no downtime inbetween. We were told when the promotion requirements started rolling out we would be offered one month per year off projects in order to work on certs but this has never happened.
However, despite that, everyone hired before me as well as several people hired shortly after me who also received 60 days onboarding with correspondingly low cert attainment have all been promoted. None of them have more than 5 certs and many of those were earned after their promotion. Promotion cycles were also never communicated to the group at large before 1.5 years ago when the onerous requirements were rolled out. So I literally had no idea they were happening. They were up to that point some type of back room deal. Their new titles were also not announced.
Since then, we had a hiring freeze, layoffs and 18 months promotion freeze. We also acquired another company with a large number of folks who were given our same job title. I was put up for promotion one time and I didn’t get it just before the acquisition. People who were promoted that cycle had less tenure than me. I had done excellent project work, all of my reviews were excellent and I’d even won a team award for the entire AMER region for the work I did alongside one other developer. He got promoted that cycle. I was told I didn’t get promoted because I had too few certs even though others who were promoted had similar numbers.
We finally got news that there was a promotion cycle happening and I was told repeatedly by my supervisor that since I did not get a promotion last time I’d for sure be considered and more strongly weighted next time. However, we did some reorganizing and I have a new supervisor who came with the acquisition. He told me last week I was not being considered for promotion. He said it was very competitive since they now have a bottleneck of people who have been waiting for promotion for three cycles. I feel especially frustrated by this, as I have discussed with him several times my desire for promotion and asked him several times what I need to do to get promoted. His answer has always been: nothing, you have a strong case for it and number of certs isn’t a deciding factor for promotion. I’ve also been working about 50 hours a week, all billable time on my project, and despite that, I still managed to get another cert on my own time and completed a 6 month leadership course offered by my company, but I feel that none of those things are taken into consideration for promotions. It really seems to be a cert count that is most important.
Another factor is that up to 10 people and possibly more on the acquisition side were not assigned to projects as we simply didn’t have enough. Some were benched six months or more and so had full time availability to get more certs. These are the same people I am now competing against for a promotion. I feel like I’m being penalized for putting my energy into my clients project and excelling, even though that is exactly what we are always told to do.
Not only that but I know for a fact that there is rampant cheating happening with these certs. One person just got accolades in our team all hands for getting 4 in one month while on a project. I know people are using test dumps to pass these certs, I’m not basing this belief solely off this one person.
I did the math and based off of the number of employees we have, bi annual promotions (assuming they aren’t frozen again) and the number of spots available each cycle it would take 16 years to promote everyone one level. That feels unreasonable to me and I also am starting to feel like I am being actively barred from promotion.
Am I being unreasonable? Is it normal to facilitate such an ultra-competitive environment for promotion? What are promotion requirements and cycles like at other places?
I meet with my supervisor next week and I want to ask him for the stats:
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how many were recommended: promoted
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cert range lowest and highest that cohort had
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what their project utilization low and high were
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how did the cert attainment relate to utilization numbers?
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how did they weigh things to make fair comparisons among those who were able to get additional certs because their util was low (they were benched and not on projects)?
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what other factors were considered and how were they weighed?
Are these inappropriate questions to ask? Is there anything else I can do here or a question I should be asking?