Use Your Year-End Review to Reach for a Promotion

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum ’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written i n partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Hard work rarely speaks for itself. When I landed my first job as a software engineer, I had a simple plan: Work hard and somebody would notice. Eventually a manager would tap me on the shoulder and hand me a promotion (probably with a nice little speech). That plan stalled my career for about five years. I switched jobs twice, kept my head down,