Moving On Up

 You may recall approximately two months ago I had applied for a managerial position at my current place of employ:  same department, some of the same duties, same people.  The process took a bit longer than I think anyone had anticipated, partially complicated by the fact that I had hauled off and gone out of the country for two weeks.

I received a job offer last week.

The offer is for a manager level position; I would be primarily responsible for a certain subsection of the activities that we do - although still doing a lot of things; we are too small a department for true specialization.  I would be "managing" five of my current peers - I say "managing" as they all know far more than I do of the operations and the history behind them. Beyond the potential increase in bonus and stock option structure, a somewhat nice thing is that due to my "years of managerial experience" (or less delicately put, I am old) they were able to increase the amount of increase between levels.  As a result, combined with my annual raise it is almost a 23% increase in the little over a year since I started here.

While I am pretty pleased with the outcome - from one of the interviewers, a friend (I actually knew and had worked with every single interviewer I had), the other candidates were credible so it was not just a slam dunk - it did strike me as a little odd.  After all, most people do not go from individual contributor to managerial level in a year. I checked with my "new" reports about how they felt about everything, mostly because I was once assigned to a former coworker when they got promoted rather hurriedly and it was not a great experience (in fact, I ended up leaving that position about six months later).  No-one seemed particularly concerned about that aspect, hopefully because they know me now well enough that a change in level is not of any concern (I remain, as I tell them, exactly as you know me now:  What You See Is What You Get).

I have to confess I feel the tiniest bit of satisfaction at this news - not just because of the promotion, but because I feel that it validates my strategy of taking the position originally:  rather than apply for a managerial position that I might or might not make the initial intake scan because of my background and lack of a scientific degree in a science field, I applied for an individual contributor role,  hoping that I could demonstrate my value and eventually things would change.

In that sense, my strategy worked out better than I had hoped.

My official new role starts next Wednesday (beginning of the pay period).  Nothing really changes in practice, other than the fact that I will have even more e-mails and more meetings (the sign of "rising in the modern corporate world).  But I do enjoy my job and my coworkers.

And for the first time in a very long time, I neither have to drive to a new place nor learn new systems (or move to new locations!) to start a new role.  All in all, not a bad way to "start" a new position.