Issue #4: Promote Yourself. Your Career Growth Depends On It

Last week, I saw a tweet that said, “If you can work without focusing on who gets the credit for the wins, you will do big things!”. Like every sentiment expressed on the portal (borrowing Patricia Lockwood’s nomenclature from her book), that tweet had people who agreed with it and those, like myself, who disagreed with it. My reason for disagreement is simple: people often get opportunities on the back of past exemplary work. If you don’t get due recognition for your work, someone else will claim your achievements and get bigger opportunities off your hard work.

For women, ethnic minorities, and other marginalised groups, getting recognised is of utmost professional importance. Professionals within these groups are often overlooked at work and aren’t assigned assignments that could set them up for big promotions or blitzscale their careers. These people have to work extra hard to be recognised. Imagine the implication of them not caring about who takes credit for wins. 

I have been fortunate to work within a large organisation where opportunities abound, and I wouldn’t have grown so quickly if my good work hadn’t been promoted and recognised. A year or so after I joined my old team, we had a thorny data problem that the leadership at the time thought of buying an expensive off-the-shelf solution for. Being the problem-solver I am, I thought I could build the solution in-house, and I managed to build a PoC in a few nights. I demoed it, and the leadership accepted my solution with much enthusiasm. I got a great financial bonus on the back of that work and had the pick of the nicest projects within the team thereon. That fast-tracked my career growth. I am sure things wouldn’t have panned out so well had I not cared about getting my deserved recognition.

If recognition is so important, why do people express the sentiment in the aforementioned tweet? I think it is because self-promotion doesn’t come naturally to many people. I struggled with it in the past myself. We believe that our excellent work should be automatically recognised and rewarded, but things don’t work that way in practice. Self-promotion makes us uncomfortable; we tend to see it as bragging, and that makes us cringe. However, we must learn to rid ourselves of this fear of self-promotion. We must learn how to tell our stories. Our career growth depends on it.

Julia Evans, brilliant writer and programmer, wrote a great article on keeping a “brag document” and using it to get recognition for our work. It is one of the articles I always recommend, and the lessons I picked up from it have helped me in my career. I hope you find it valuable too.

Good luck, and I can’t wait to hear about the good things you achieve in your careers💜