In my years of experience in the tech industry, I’ve worked for companies with structured promotion processes and others that went by gut feeling. Incredibly though, the profiles of people who got promoted tended to have some common characteristics. When I read or hear Software Engineers say things like “I want to grow as an Individual Contributor, so I decided to study Rust to aim for a promotion,” I naturally smile and think to myself that this plan is unlikely to end well. Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of things you can learn from studying a new programming language, but there are other things to focus on that could have much more effect in getting you that promotion.

1. Understand What Your Company Rewards

The first rule: every company has its own evaluation criteria. There are companies that value people who create new features/products and follow their complete lifecycle, from ideation to production. An example is Google where especially for certain roles you’re “forced” to launch new products to get a promotion. In fact, it’s full of products that once the Individual Contributor who pushed for them has exhausted their purpose, end up abandoned and discontinued. Other companies instead reward those who improve existing processes, like Amazon, where the focus is on efficiency and continuous optimization. Still others look with admiration at those who simply manage to save the massive costs of the Cloud.

Learn to understand where you are, talk to people who have been recently promoted and ask what skills or results led to their promotion. Remember, every company is different.

Career Frameworks

If your company has a Career Framework, it’s another good starting point. But be careful: often these documents are too generic. They have to be, since they need to fit an entire Engineering department into various levels: words like “complexity,” “distributed systems,” “high impact” abound in the text without giving you a measuring stick (even though they should).

My advice is to ask your manager to translate those principles into concrete and practical examples. Your Manager plays an important role in your growth and is the first person to judge whether you’re ready or not for the next step: it’s fundamental to understand the interpretation they give to those principles.

Ask specific questions:

  • “What exactly does ‘technical leadership’ mean for my role?”
  • “Can you give me an example of a project that demonstrates ‘business impact’?”

Business Impact

This is a common denominator across all companies. Yes, I explained earlier that different companies reward different behaviors, but having the description of business impact in your Promo Case is an evergreen that any manager likes. The most important thing you need to do is quantify it.

Some examples:

  • don’t say “I improved performance,” say “I reduced response times by 40%, generating an estimated savings of X euros per year.”
  • avoid “I increased system resilience,” explain how “after my refactoring, the number of production incidents on that component decreased from 4 per month to 1 every 3 months.”
  • rewrite “I released the new feature X that sped up analysis time for Operations people” by citing how “the new feature X allows handling 10% more cases in the same time, allowing us to grow without needing to hire more in the Operations department.”

Understand How Your Manager Is Evaluated

It’s not just about getting them to delegate parts of their work to you, although that is a way for you to grow and try new challenges. Their objectives become opportunities for you. If their success depends on team retention, propose initiatives to improve employee experience. If they need to accelerate delivery, focus on automation and efficiency.

Besides quickly earning their trust, understanding how your Manager is evaluated helps you think big, at a level of impact higher than the one you currently operate at. This is true even if you want to grow as an Individual Contributor without pursuing the Manager path.

2. “I’m on it”: The Power of Responsibility

The second rule: promotions follow responsibilities, they don’t precede them.

I’ve seen too many colleagues wait for the title before acting like a senior or lead. It’s the wrong approach. First you take on responsibility and demonstrate impact, then comes the recognition.

When you say “I’m on it” and keep your promise, you build a reputation for reliability. When you solve problems without being assigned them, you demonstrate proactivity. When you actively seek more responsibility, you signal healthy ambition.

Have you ever read in a group chat about an incident a Senior Engineer respond “I’m on it”? I have, both as a manager and as a simple colleague, and what I usually felt was a mix of serenity and admiration. Serenity because I knew the problem would be solved, admiration because that person had taken the initiative without waiting to be asked. And I had even more desire to help them.

Remember: you are the main person responsible for your career. Managers change, company priorities shift, but your growth depends on you.

“I’m on it” also applies to your career.

Make Your Work Visible

The best work is useless if nobody knows about it. Some practical ways:

  • Documentation: write decision records, post-mortems, technical guides and keep a Brag Journal (even private)
  • Presentations: share the results of your projects in team meetings, whether it’s a demo or a review. No need for PowerPoint, just sharing your screen works
  • Asynchronous communication: update regularly on progress, don’t wait for them to ask
  • Internal blog posts: share solutions and best practices
  • 1-on-1s: don’t assume your manager knows everything you’re working on. Tell them about it

Keep Your Promises

Always. When you can’t keep a promise, communicate proactively. Transparency builds trust, silence destroys it.

If you told someone you would release something on a certain day and you realize you’re running late, write to them as soon as you realize it, tell them why and propose a new date. Don’t wait for them to ask you about it.

I also really appreciate people who simply tell me: “you asked me something complex that I need time to think through an answer, let’s touch base by Friday morning, I’ll send you a meeting invite.”

3. Ask for Feedback and Return Value

The third rule: feedback is a super-power, if you know how to use it.

Not all feedback is useful. Learn to filter: ask for advice from people you respect and who have achieved results you admire. But don’t limit yourself to engineers.

Realize that asking for feedback requires an investment (of time and energy) from the person who has to write it: thank them and, if you found it useful, explain what you intend to do to improve. This also helps you commit more seriously because you’ve shared your plan with someone.

The Power of Non-Technical Feedback

Some of the most valuable feedback comes from:

  • Product managers
  • Designers
  • Customer success
  • Marketing and sales colleagues

They see your work from different perspectives and can highlight blind spots that technical colleagues don’t notice. A PM who advises you to be clearer in your demos and use storytelling techniques is worth as much as a Senior Engineer who suggests you study JVM internals.

External Validation

Participate in meetups, give talks, contribute to open source projects. External validation gives you internal credibility and exposes you to different perspectives.

It also helps you create a sort of portfolio of your skills and experiences, which can prove useful in the future, especially if you want to change jobs.

Be a Mentor

Stop for a second and think about who you consider to have been your first mentor or the most significant one in your career. That person who made you turn the corner. Feel the emotions you experience when you think of him/her. Now ask yourself: how can I do the same for someone else?

Few things are as important in your growth as helping others do the same. Be a mentor.

Conclusions

Before you close this tab, I want to go against what I was saying at the beginning: learning a new programming language, sometimes, is the right thing to do to grow. Just like studying Design Patterns or automated testing.

But I believe the Internet is full of people promoting this as if it were the only thing needed in an Individual Contributor career. It’s not like that, or at least there are very few companies in the world that reward only this component without all the rest I’ve told you about.

Happy growing! 🚀