How You Can Get A New Role Without Changing Company
Making lateral moves where you already work
Sometimes you can get a new job without even moving company, you might not even have to move floor or desk. You can make an internal move within your company.
When I started at a company I shall call OsCorp, I was told I would do 6 months in Support then move to Project Delivery. I didn’t want to work in Support, but took the temporary pain to get closer to my long-term goals.
I stupidly, STUPIDLY I SAY! did not get the above promise in writing, even though I have advised similar things to friends in similar situations before. I was told in the interview that everyone trains in Support then moves on in 6 months.
6 months passed and I was told there were no open roles in Project Delivery (PD).
I was distraught, I didn’t know what to do instead.
I focused on getting really good in Support whilst I waited (this turned out to be key in my lateral move).
I ended up working a project in PD, I thought this might win me some favour with the team, but ultimately was fruitless. Maybe it was just a distraction to keep me from pestering them about my a permanent move.
Meanwhile, my boss in Support didn’t want people leaving every 6 months, because she was trying to build a team with some actual product knowledge and experience, rather than lose people once they know what they’re doing.
At about the 1 year mark, I interviewed a colleague, because he had worked in both PD and Product Engineering (PE) (the two departments other than Support who had software developers). I was not asking him to sneakily suggest I deserved a job, I just genuinely wanted advice from someone who had experience in both teams, so I might know where to target my energy from now on.
He actually made Product Engineering seem much more interesting, there were more technologies to learn and more potential paths to follow e.g. some colleagues had gone full-stack, some into DevOps, and so on.
My interviewing must have impressed him, as he ended up offering me a job in PE as he was about to take over the Database team, I didn’t currently have an offer in the PD team and thought PE sounded like the better move for me.
I ended up spending 2.5 years in his team, so it worked out well.
I also got a 7.5% pay increase, despite not getting officially promoted, as it was a later move, followed by a further 4.8% increase in 6 months and a promotion to go with it.
Later found out that the manager of PD was never planning to hire me, but had just been keeping me sweet (I suck at office politics, so didn’t realise this at the time).
The Keys To My Successful Lateral Move
There were many factors that went into this successful lateral move:
I networked with the boss of the database team
This wasn’t my intention, but it was what I was doing, something that you can use in a more targeted way if you want to do the same thing.
I excelled at my current job
This meant that there was good word spreading about me and my current boss was kind enough to sing my praises and put my career ahead of building her own team.
I had a really supportive boss
When I made the lateral move, she actually fought for it to be a diagonal move, so I would get promoted immediately and get the 7.5% and 4.8% in one go, but the company needed to test me first, but she still got me money I wasn’t even asking for, because she was a great boss, who cared about her people.
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Photo by Amirrasim Ashna on Unsplash