I Got Promoted!

Author:Murphy | View: 28257 | Time: 2025-03-23 12:23:31

I'm thrilled to share that I've recently been promoted!!! This is definitely a significant milestone in my Career Development. Reflecting on my journey, including all the achievements and struggles along the way, I can see my growth from being a junior new grad to a senior who leads multiple project deliverables. Last year, I published an article about the seven principles I follow to be a better data scientist and got a lot of positive feedback. In this article, I want to share more learnings about data scientists' career development that have helped me get promoted. Hopefully, my insights will be beneficial to accelerate your career growth, especially if you are new to the industry.

Achieving a promotion signifies that you are performing beyond your current grade level, and the primary factor that determines this is the impact of your work. This article will not only focus on discussing how to generate impact but also how to deliver impact both within your team and outside your team. Both elements are equally important in terms of showcasing your performance. The article's structure is shown below:

Generate impact

Generate impact means you need to finish and excel in the tasks assigned to you. To consistently produce high-quality deliverables, what are the best practices? Here are some tips that I have summarized:

Improve productivity

I am sure you must have heard a lot about improving productivity through time management or energy management. I have tried several suggestions over the years. In the work setting, the most practical and useful one for me is blocking time for deep working hours.

I define deep work as researching methods to solve problems, coding to establish pipelines, studying model results and making improvements, etc. These types of work are difficult but crucial for the final deliverables. When I work on these, I don't want to be interrupted by meetings, emails, or messages. Thus, I dedicate the unlikely-to-be-interrupted times for these tasks. In my case, it usually would be the afternoons. Blocking deep working hours ensures consistent, high-quality output while maintaining necessary communications.

Modularize tasks

There are a lot of recurring and repeated tasks at work. Maybe you need to run the same EDA and modeling process for different projects; maybe you need to make the same presentation every month with updated results; maybe you need to teach the same thing to different people, etc. When you face these tasks, modularize them like how you would build classes and functions while coding. You can build a standard processing pipeline for data analysis or write certain functions to calculate metrics. You can save certain templates for specific documents and presentations and record good practices through documentation or videos to ramp up others more smoothly. Even though the initial setup will take longer, it will save you a lot of time and energy in the future.

Collaborate

Learning how to collaborate is as important as developing your own core skills. No one is an isolated island working on projects solving ambiguous business problems. Everyone is good at something, so you don't have to be an expert in everything. Take the chance to deep dive and improve your core skills. In addition, collaboration also challenges me to think further and deeper while brainstorming ideas and working on projects collectively. Collaboration with delegation is the path toward senior roles as we are learning how to tackle more complicated problems with more efficiency.

However, workplace collaboration and communications can be tricky sometimes, check out my recent video about how to deal with conflicts at work:

Ask for help

Whenever you run into roadblocks, don't be afraid to ask for help. You can communicate with domain experts for clarification and update managers on progress towards extending the deadline. For these who are new to the company, they may be afraid of asking questions because they don't want to show weakness, or they have the impostor syndrome. If I ask too many questions or if I cannot solve this problem by myself, will my coworkers and managers lose trust in me and start to doubt whether I am qualified for my job. For impostor syndrome, this article explains it very well:

Confronting the Reality of Impostor Syndrome in the Data and Analytics Industry

As the article says, imposter syndrome is so common in the tech industry because this field is constantly changing and growing. I am constantly fighting against it by faking it until I make it. Focusing on your own growth rather than comparing with others, in fact, leveraging others to help you grow. Companies provide resources for us to onboard and improve our skills. Do not waste it. Look for mentors, sponsors, and coaches to help you improve hard and soft skills in the long run.

Manage expectations

Managing expectations is an important aspect of managing up, and it's crucial for sustainable career development. Everyone's time and energy is limited. If you are overpromising what you can deliver to impress people at work, you are either facing the risk of burnout or the disappointments and consequences of being unable to finish on time. Besides not overpromising, another useful trick is to constantly align priorities. Find out the focus of this quarter, this month, this week, and this day. Things do change, that's why we need to constantly align priorities within the team so we focus on the most important tasks all the time.

Solve problems, not emotions

We would be so productive and efficient if only we were emotionless machines. Unfortunately, we are human beings with different skills and preferred working styles. Frictions are common. They come from different opinions, mindsets, backgrounds, focuses, etc. In a working environment, we need to solve problems, not people or emotions. You should know what you prefer so you can communicate and set up boundaries. In the meantime, keep an open mind with different perspectives and working styles. Learn when to cooperate and when to compromise. Remember, whenever disagreements come, land on action points focus on moving forward by solving problems, not people, not emotions.

Continuous learning

Working in the ever-changing tech industry means that we need to keep learning continuously. In my recent article, I have provided some practical advice on these, take a look if you are interested:

Continuous Learning: A Data Scientist's Odyssey

Deliver impact

Generating impact is the first step. To complete the task, you need to deliver the impact to create business value and complete the loop. Delivering impact efficiently is a crucial and undervalued skill at work, and the increasingly common remote and hybrid work settings are not helping. In this section, I want to discuss how to deliver impact, both within the team and across teams.

Deliver within team impact

There are different aspects regarding increasing within team impact, but the only one I want to discuss here is Leadership skills. As an IC (individual contributor) and as someone who is not interested in pursuing a management position in the future, is it still necessary to develop leadership skills? I have only seen the importance of developing leadership skills after an insightful conversation with my mentor. My mentor helped me understand that leadership involves more than managing a team. Practicing leadership skills means:

Managing up with supervisors on project expectations and priorities;
Collaborating effectively with coworkers to deliver projects on time and know how to give and receive credit, compliments, and feedback;
Mentoring and bringing junior team members up to speed;
Taking ownership and being proactive about your projects.

Not everyone has the same opinion, but for me, the impact generated comes from completing and delivering projects, as well as helping less experienced individuals grow and become self-sufficient. When I first started ramp-up juniors, I doubted whether this was worth it since it takes longer to teach someone about something than just finishing the tasks by yourself. However, it is important to consider the long-term benefits of a team's development, as well as to manage time and energy sustainably for yourself. When I realized this, it was the first moment when I transformed my mindset from a junior to a senior.

Deliver cross-team impact

The cross-team impact is also essential to get promoted. It shows that you are creating impacts outside of your team, which would benefit the whole organization. As someone who has been working fully remotely, I found it even harder to build connections with people outside of my team. In this case, I try my best to establish my reputation using every possible opportunity. There are several channels I used:

When you have the chance, visit different company offices and use the opportunity to connect with coworkers on both professional and personal levels.
Engage in cross-team tasks leveraging your expertise. For example, I was hosting a learning cohort with participants from different teams on data skills;
Make sure to establish a good reputation by showcasing your expertise. Whenever you interact with other teams, use the opportunity to demonstrate how your work can help alleviate their pain points. Avoid showing off your skills and instead, focus on how you can assist others.
Communicate with stakeholders about project progress constantly. Learn how to highlight your work with both technical and non-technical audiences. I have discussed more details about this in the following article:

The 4Ds in Data Storytelling: Making Art Out of Science

Last remarks

Besides working hard and performing above your grade level, it is important to communicate your desire for Promotion to your manager and skip manager at the appropriate times. Prepare evidence to support your promotion case and request feedback on additional requirements for the next grade level during communications. Keeping your head down to get the work done is not enough anymore. Clear and effective communication of expectations and feedback is crucial for workforce growth, even though it might not be easy for everyone. I always go through extensive preparation and rehearsals before communicating, and I may still feel unnatural next time. However, asking for recognition is an important step in being responsible for yourself. You have to be more proactive in your own career development than anyone.

Last but not least, it is important to celebrate when you get promoted. However, it's equally important to not doubt yourself or be too hard on yourself if you don't. Although it may sound very political, getting promoted actually depends on a lot of factors. Even though I share a lot of advice here, I am very cautious about not taking too much credit from luck. Getting promoted depends largely on how your company is doing and how your team is doing, which is largely out of your control. Constantly communicate your expectations, do your best at work, and focus on what you can control while leaving the rest to fate. If you don't think your efforts are recognized and appreciated enough, finding a place that values you more is always better than believing you are not worth it.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think in the comment below. If you like this article, don't forget to: