Preparing for promotion

If you are successful in following your own advice and successful in achieving your goals, sooner or later someone will notice. Unless you are already at the top of the heap, you’ll be on the fast track to promotion.

There are two types of promotion:

• by merit
• by long service.

The second only happens once or twice before the individual achieves a level that is the limit of their skills. Occasionally managers are promoted beyond their competence level, but this is inevitably a recipe for disaster and does the organization no good at all.

Promotion on merit can come two ways:

• Keep working hard and someone will notice eventually.
• Find out what you need to know to get the next job up the ladder – or a specific role you’ve targeted. Acquire and demonstrate the skills needed for this role, preferably to those who will be making the decision.

There is one big problem – if you’re ready to move on, who will take on your responsibilities? If you’ve been following the techniques in this book, you should have someone trained and ready to go – so what’s stopping you!