This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Ritvika Nagula, a senior software engineer at Microsoft Azure. She’s worked at the company since 2019. Her employment and promotions were confirmed by Business Insider. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I think I learned the strategy of getting promotions the hard way.
When I first joined Microsoft in April 2019 as a new college grad, I guess I was pretty nice. I did not know that I should be proactive about communicating my career aspirations with my manager. I just thought that if I consistently delivered good quality work, it would eventually naturally lead to promotions.
But it was a passive approach, and it can lead to a disconnect where your manager or the leadership thinks that you are not necessarily career ambitious.
That’s something I kind of missed during my first year. Since then, I have gotten four promotions in five years.
I make it a point to frequently request feedback from my manager and not necessarily wait for the review cycle. At Microsoft, our reviews are semiannual, but that means it could still take six months to find out that you haven’t necessarily reached expectations for certain things. And you don’t have enough time left to course correct at that moment.
So what I generally do is have biweekly one-on-ones with my manager. I try to make sure that once a month I bring up this topic and ask: “What do you think is going good? Do you think I could do something better? Is there anything that I might be overlooking and would you suggest I improve on?”
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And then just for myself, I normally try to set career goals. For instance, I set a goal of reaching the next level within 18 to 24 months.
Know what’s expected of the level you are trying to get to, and be proactive
The first thing you need to understand is your expectations: what your manager, the team, and the company expect of a person at your current level and what they expect of a person at the next level. Then, you need to ask what the gap is between the two and how you can close that gap.
It’s self-awareness, or trying to be aware that this is what is expected of me. Am I hitting all of these checklist items? Am I missing something? Is there something that I don’t know that I should know? Talking to peers, having work mentors, and talking to your manager can help you progress in this area when you try to figure out what you’re lacking and what you need to do better.
At Microsoft, there is an internal website called the role library, and it’s very descriptive. It says that if you’re a software engineer at X, Y, or Z level, this is what the company basically expects you to be performing, and all the tasks that you are expected to be doing on a day-to‑day basis.
If your company has something like that, check it. And then I would correlate that during the talks with my manager to see what I could be doing better.
I also knew that if I wanted to get promoted to a senior level, it was expected that I deliver a project end-to-end. From the design phase to implementing and monitoring, and making sure you’re rolling out with limited bugs. That was something I identified I needed and would have frequent conversations with my manager to put it out there to him. I’d say: “If you are targeting my next promotion, I believe this is what I need to do. So how can we identify opportunities for such projects?”
This gave my manager the impression that, “Yes, she looks to be ready and she’s interested in doing more and delivering more than what she’s actually doing right now.”
That way, whenever there was a new feature or opportunity, my manager would remember, “Hey, I have this one person who mentioned that she would be interested in picking up something like this.”
Getting promoted is not just doing the work that you’ve been asked to do; it’s also taking ownership, taking control, and trying to find these opportunities for yourself. It’s also not just about what work you are doing; sometimes, it also matters how high the impact of that work is, and it has to align with your team’s goals and the company’s goals.
Do you have a story to share about a résumé that got you the job or how you landed your big promotion? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@businessinsider.com.
