How do I move up in my career? This is a very common question that people ask me all the time, in different ways. It is, of course, a hard question to answer, and also a hard thing to achieve in general – otherwise, everyone will be doing it!
And also, everyone – whether you are junior, senior, or career switcher – everyone’s situation is different and most likely requires personalized solutions. The obvious solution is to be better than everyone else in some ways, but how? In this article, I will explain my approach that got me promotion and raises quickly throughout my career.
I think the best way to demonstrate this is to tell my own story. Specifically, the story of how I transitioned my career into the tech industry back in 2013. My story is quite long so if you don’t want to read the whole thing, just skip ahead to the My strategies section.
My story
New kid on the block
It was 2009, right after the great depression of 2008. I just graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in music but struggled to hold down a job. In 2013, I managed to find full time employment (the way I got hired was also interesting by itself, but that’s another story for another time) in Los Angeles county as an “eligibility worker” working in a call center for $30k (pretax) a year. In other words, I was basically a call center agent helping welfare program participants.
Initially, I was excited because this was my first full time employment ever and $30k was higher than what I ever made. At one point, I actually pictured myself working there until 70 years old and then enjoy the rest of my life collecting government pension. But before long, I realized that I didn’t like talking to strangers all day long for a living, and the career path had a very limited growth potential (something like worker -> supervisor -> deputy director -> director -> deputy chief). Cold quitting was not an option because I liked getting paid and had no alternative plans.
Eventually, I saw two paths to get out of the call center work: either move up quickly, or change my career to something better. I was motivated to do either one, but didn’t know anything back then so I wasn’t sure which one to take, so I decided to just “go with the flow”, which was my mantra for everything back then. (side note: it’s totally ok to go with the flow if you don’t know what you want to do at the moment. Eventually, you will find the way or it will find you)
The power of networking
The word “networking” may sound scary for an introvert like myself, but I have been a strange introvert my whole life. Ever since I was a little kid, I hated interacting with others but liked to walk around the playground to look at the other kids. At my call center job, I also liked to do my rounds all over the building but this time with the intention to get to know people. Soon, everybody in the building knew me as “that kid who walked around” or at least recognized me by face (yes I was a kid to most workers there because they were 10+ years older than me). I also joined as many special assignments as possible, like the party planning committee, various wellness programs, and trainings, and even volunteered to play music in the office band at company parties. My primary motive was to not having to take calls, but my second motive was, you guessed it, to network with other people.
Why would ever I want to network with people as an introvert!? That sounds just crazy. But I did it anyway because I had a hunch that knowing people would be more beneficial to my career than not, and ultimately it was the right move. Through networking, I learned many things like tips to better handle difficult callers, useful gossips (like who was a good manager/colleague and who was not, so I could avoid or approach them), knowledge about welfare programs that I didn’t know about (which I then shared with a few others as favors), and even hidden future opportunities. I even got to the good side of some managers, most importantly deputy director, R, who informally mentored me, and manager, M, who would later be instrumental for boosting my career in a big way – more on that later.
Optimize the work
With the help and mentorship from my work friends, I got better and quicker at handling calls. By taking more calls daily, my metrics has improved but I got bored with the calls, so I started studying the call-taking process itself, and looking for ways to optimize my calls, with the intention to make my calls even easier.
Here were some of the tweaks I made:
- Typically, when I picked up a call, I didn’t know anything about the caller and so here was the sequence:
1. I asked for the case number
2. I entered it into the system and waited it to load. If i heard the case number wrong, I asked for it again, and again, and again. If the caller didn’t have the case number, then I had to look it up by name, date of birth, and address
3. The caller had to verify the name, date of birth, and address
4. I asked what the caller was calling about
5. I reviewed the case notes
6. I helped the caller
I found out that I could see most of the caller’s information before I even pick up, so here was the new sequence:
1. If possible, I opened or looked up the case in advance without needing to ask the caller
2. I asked what the caller was calling about, while reviewing the case notes. After this, I usually knew what to do
3. I asked the caller had to verify the name, date of birth, and address, while researching the info
4. I helped the caller
The new sequence greatly sped up the process and reduced the error of mishearing the case number (“5, n as in nancy, b as in boy, e as in elephant…”). Callers usually appreciate my responsiveness and were more pleasant towards me. This both saved time and made the calls easier - Instead of taking notes after the call, I started taking notes bit by bit during the call. This meant that I was able to take shorter breaks between calls so I could take more of them. I also mastered typing while talking so I still could deliver excellent customer service to my callers
- I used many keyboard shortcuts to navigate between 3 different systems. This, combined with my already fast typing skill, made it very easy to find information overall
After my optimization, not even a year into my job, my performance was outstanding, I have developed a great work reputation, and I finally saw the light to advance in this career path. However, it hasn’t fixed the problem that I didn’t enjoy this career path at all. No matter how much I learned and optimized, I still saw this as a dead end job. Luckily, fate has pulled me into another that I did and do enjoy – IT.
Continued education
Sometime in 2014, I experienced the end of a long-term relationship. To me, the breakup was painful but I also saw it as a wake-up call to be something better. Shortly after, I enrolled myself to an online bachelors program in IT and got my degree within 9 months.
Why IT specifically? I have always liked to work (or play) on computers, and also in the office, in additional to the workers, there were tech support agents who walked around to help the workers with computer and printer issues. It seemed to me like they were having a good time (which I later found that it is not always the case, but every job has its ups and downs), and they made more than the workers. What’s not to like?
So to increase my changes to switch my career into IT, I also befriended these tech support agents, and upon hearing about my IT career aspirations, they were willing to help me by giving me advices, and sometimes they would even show me what they were working on to get me some real-life experiences.
All was going well, but I was still stuck in my position until the “side project” happened.
The side project
Companies like Google famously popularized the concept of 20% time which means that employees could allocate up to 20% of their company time to work on personal projects that benefit the company. Being a newbie in 2014, I didn’t know about the concept and LA County surely did not have such a policy, but I accidentally created my first side project that propelled my confidence and career. In fact, to this day, everywhere I work, I still create side projects to create value for the company and to build credibility for myself. But I digress, let’s get back to the story for the moment.
Here was the situation: due to a new policy, whenever a caller called in about a specific program, the call center agent had to mail a new form to the caller. Some made this form in Microsoft Word doc format (.doc) and distributed the doc file to all the callers. In this form, the TO and FROM addresses in the top left and top right corners were left with blank lines, so the workers had to fill out the addresses of the caller and the assigned district office name + address, print out the form, put it inside a windowed envelope so the caller’s address became visible, and then leave the envelope into a tray for mailroom processing.
Now, this process may not seem that complicated, but I noticed 2 major problems. First, as you are typing or copying/pasting into the blank lines, it pushes the lines over so you have to manually delete the extra line characters to prevent the lines from spilling over to the rest of the form. The preservation of the format was important because if the caller’s address was not entirely visible from the window of the envelope, then the worker had to fix the format and reprint the form. Second, the system only showed the name of the office but not the address, so each time the worker had to look up which office the caller was assigned to, and then type or copy/paste the name and address of the office. The office lookup problem could potentially be reduced by having a separate office directory document, but no such document was provided so I went to the welfare office website to get the address. Together, these 2 problems waste incur a lot of process time for the agents.
One day, I got tired after processing these forms for the 10th time of the day, and started thinking over potential solutions of both problems. For the formatting problem, I recalled seeing PDF files with fillable text boxes that don’t mess up the format, so what if I convert this form into a PDF file and then add the text boxes myself? I didn’t know how to do this initially, but luckily the internet was around so I learned how to create the file and tested it repeatedly to make sure that it worked (it did). For the office look up problem, I didn’t know how to fix it completely, but I did create a dropdown list for the office names, and added text boxes for the office address. The workers still had to look up the addresses and copy/paste, but at least they didn’t need to type in the office names and the format was preserved.
After I created this form, I showed it to my manager who said something like “that’s nice, but just keep it to yourself.” The advice was reasonable – in a government agency such as my office, one has to follow the “chain of command” for communications, meaning that if you need something, you are supposed to ask your manager, who would go up the management chain to ask their manager and repeat the process, then communicate back down the chain. The workers were at the lowest end of the chain, they were supposed to be following orders, not inventing. Taking this into context, my manager was implying that he didn’t want to “rock the boat” by forwarding my invention to his manager and risked getting in trouble. I could have broken the chain of command and forwarded to someone higher up, but breaking the chain was frown upon and had lead to people getting reprimanded, hurting their future career, so I backed down, took his advice and only used the form for myself. This was not a waste of time though, for I learned something new and the form gave me, and me alone, the advantage of quickly and accurately processing the forms.
Just a few weeks later, our office got a office director, A, who had a very reformed mindset and wanted to make everything better. He rolled out a few new initiatives, one of them being a new unit, and I volunteered to be part of it and got a new manager, M. I showed M my side project and unlike my previous manager, M said this is something that A should see and encouraged me to email it to him directly, which I did. A replied back quickly and said he loved the form, and wanted to meet me the next day to talk about it in person. I was both excited and nervous about the meeting, I could barely sleep that night.
The next day, I went into A’s office. We went over the form, like how it was created and how it worked, and then he asked me if I could make it even easier for the workers to populate the office’s address. After leaving his office, I figured out an elegant solution with some basic coding (for those who are curious, this is how it worked: when someone selects an office name from the dropdown list, a script would run to look up the corresponding address and populate the address text boxes, This eliminates the need to look up the office addresses and copy/paste altogether.) I showed it to A the next day, and he happily pulled some office politics magic on his end to get my form officially distributed to all the workers – not just in my own call center, but the other call centers and possibly all the field offices as well. My rough calculation is that the form probably have saved at least a minute each time a worker uses it, and there were probably thousands of workers, even if they used it once a day, it would have saved thousands and thousands of hours of productivity. Talk about making an impact!
Ever since the distribution of the form, A decided to keep me in his administrative section and assigned me special projects to do. Instead of taking calls, I worked pretty much directly under him for the next few months, until I found my next job opportunity. I owe both A and M a lot for my subsequent career success and to this day, I am forever grateful.
My strategies
Now that I have finished my story, let’s summarize what I have done right. There are 2 major strategies that I have followed: make the right friends, and do the right work.
Strategy 1: make the the right friends
This is more formally known as professional networking, and I am talking primarily about work friends here (although, you should make right personal friends too).
To you introverts like myself, this is a daunting task, but it is very important for you to put yourself out there for the sake of a successful career! Here are some recommended books I read to build up the confidence to talk to people:
Whenever I start a new job, I like to figure out who I will be working with and anyone particularly interesting to talk to. I would then message some of these people to make an introduction, and schedule a meeting with them to understand what they do, what they expect me to do, and how the company works in general. These information help me quickly navigate a new work environment so I can start being productive sooner. Unlike some new employees who take weeks to onboard, I usually start contributing since day 2.
Identify the friends
While a good manager/onboarding buddy can make recommendations on who you should talk to, I prefer to study the company’s organization chart, yes, study. Through the organization chart, I can see the overall structure of my team, department, and even the company if it’s small, and I can identify relevant people by report, job title, level. I would even go as far as stalking some of the more interesting people on the internet and on LinkedIn. Even though it is a little creepy, I enjoy doing this and this research can help you understand their background and work style so you can approach them correctly.
Make them your friends
How do you make people your work friends/allies? If you have done proper research on them, it’s easy to make conversations based on their common interests and background – for example, you both like football or board games or traveling or classic rock music, or you went to the same school or grew up in the same town, or you both have messy young kids. But for me, the easiest way to make allies is to help them resolve their biggest issues. In fact, one of my interview tips is to ask the interviewers what their biggest pain points are. I would discuss potential solutions with them during the interview, and make a commitment to them that if I get hired, I will work with them to fix the pain points (and then actually follow through). More on this later when discussing strategy 2.
Why professional networking matters
The benefits of getting yourself well-recognized by management are obvious: they go easier on you, assign you better work tasks, more willing to help you on tasks, and fight for you to get that raise or promotion. You don’t have to be brown nosing – just put yourself out there enough that the higher-ups remember you in a positive way, and whenever they need someone, they can come to you for help.
A lesser-known benefit is getting mentorship from someone more experienced than you. Whether you are junior or senior level, it’s good to get a mentor or even multiple mentors. Good mentors can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and make recommendations on how to improve yourself so you can get to the next level. This is like having a flashlight while exploring a dark maze – it makes it much easier and quicker to see and find your way.
Finally, besides the higher-ups, having good relationships with your peers, including those who are lower ranked than you, is incredibly rewarding. It becomes more fun to work together and maybe in the future, you can help each other with job referrals! And if you keep in touch after leaving the company, sometimes you also get to hear juicy gossips 😉.
Strategy 2: do the right work
In my view, professional networking is not enough for success. Unless you have extraordinary communication skills, you can only brown-nose your way up so much, but at the end, you still need to deliver results or you will eventually get exposed as a fraud. This is where the second strategy comes in.
This strategy involves not just doing any work, but doing impactful work. Work that benefits multiple people, maybe your entire team, or department, or even the whole company. Another word is to describe someone who does this kind of work is a multiplier and you should become one. An example would be the PDF form I created in my story which saved tens of thousands of work hours.
Despite how glorious the word “impactful” sounds, very often it is tedious work (most people don’t want to do them), or invisible (people don’t know about them), or sometimes both. That makes sense – if it is easy, then everyone else would be doing it, but precisely because it is not, this becomes the opportunity to prove yourself’s worth.
The general idea is: work harder and smarter than the others.
Work harder
The first step is to work more than the others. Let’s say you are a call center agent like my past self and your performance is based on how many calls you take. If the other people takes X calls each week, aim to take more than that, whether it is 5 more, 10 more, double the number, you decide. In addition to better metrics, because you do more, you get more exposed to different problems and therefore acquire more work experience and grow quicker.
Then, volunteer for everything. The newly-formed party planning committee is looking for members? You are now in the committee. Did someone ask for testers for a new process? You sign up, test through the entire process and provide thorough and constructive feedback. A person just left the company? Ask if you can take over some of that person’s responsibilities. If you keep volunteering, you will get to network to people you otherwise may never interact with (see strategy 1), and people will recognize that you are dependable. You will then get offered even more opportunities.
Finally, spend your spare time doing self-development. Things like reading books, exercising, meditating, practicing communication skills, learning will help broaden your horizons and keep your mind sharp.
If you have done at least some of the above, you would already have more experience and knowledge than your peers. Now you may proceed with the second step – work smarter.
Work smarter
A hard worker is a useful, dependable mule, but a smart worker, aka a multiplier, can increase productivity equivalent to many, many hard workers, and these multipliers are the valuable assets what management is looking for. Now that you have done the hard work, with your expertise, you are ready to help multiply productivity.
I want you to think about some of the most tedious, repetitive work you have to do everyday. Pick one of them and write down the steps of the work process, and then step back and look at the steps. Are there any steps that can be automated or optimized? If so, pick one of these steps and then experiment away. Build a proof of concept, test it thoroughly, have a mentor look at it, and then present it to a trusted manager. If all goes well, then it will get implemented and you are now a productivity multiplier! Then repeat this over and over again. Even if your proposal is rejected, you will still get valuable experience, and you will eventually get recognized for the work you do. In other words, it is never a waste of time.
Now you may think that I made it sound too easy, and I assure that it is not, at least not initially, but it gets easier the more you do it. A little bit of creativity and luck help too, and if you need more then you can also use AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and many others)! Ask your AI agent to do anything like writing an email draft, creating a spreadsheet formula, writing code. If you are completely stuck, you can even paste the steps of the process you want to improve and ask it for recommendations! Look up prompt engineering if you need to improve your AI-fu.
Final thought: What are your goals?
Remember what I said earlier that it’s ok to go with the flow? It doesn’t mean you should not have goals. Without goals, you are like a headless chicken running around in circles. That was, in fact, me throughout my 20s – all I knew is that I wanted a “comfortable”, middle class lifestyle like my parents and everyone else around me. As I kept learning and growing, something clicked in my mid-30s and I wanted to be more successful than them by achieving financial independence quicker. And if you have followed along with my goal updates, I am a practitioner of the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement. My motivation to FIRE myself pushes me to use my 2 strategies to keep delivering excellent results at work, so I can earn a higher income from work which I then use for investments for producing passive income. Your motivation may be different than mine.
Where do you want to be in the future? It does not have to be specific and it is ok if you don’t know just yet. Just think about what you want in life, what matters to you. Use the goals as your motivation, your drive to success. Keep thinking about it everyday (or even turn it into a vision board) so you can work towards making it the reality. If I could do it, so can you. I believe in you!
Promotion – free book!
Thanks for reading this post. I am running a limited promotion to send out a free, shipping included, physical copy of Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come to the first 5 US-based people who ask for one. This was written by a severely introverted woman who made steps to overcome her people problem. A very fun read and I find it inspring.
To qualify, you must have a US mailing address and a self-admitted introvert. To get a copy, simply repost this LinkedIn post and/or this X post, and then DM me, on either platform, your name and address.