This is one of the speeches I gave at a company event. Hopefully someone learns from this.
To take this forward, I would like to share two instances from my previous jobs. Hopefully, those will reiterate the belief in our system and also throw some light on the career path. When I started off with a construction company, where career path was unheard of. If you make sure you keep your senior engineer on the site in good humor, you will get a good hike the next year. Since I was staring off my career, I didn’t know much about how to make sure that I keep that person happy apart from doing good work. It was my first job and I hadn’t developed the soft skills like saying yes to the boss even though I knew that he was absolutely wrong on many occasions. So we both differed and there went my chances of a good appraisal. I thought, doing good work will automatically earn me brownie points and I should be able to go up the ladder, though I didn’t know whether there was any ladder existed in that company at that time. I say this because, the senior engineer was the person running the show on the site. Appraisal cycles were unheard of, but every year we had a review. Honestly, I didn’t know what went on. The senior engineer will talk to the DGM and come back with the comments. There wont be anything recorded on anything. So, I had the opportunity to get some feedback. That was the shortest ever appraisal ever done in my life. The conversation was for two mins. He called me in and told that I am still going to be a junior engineer for another year.since I knew It was coming, I stood up and started to leave when he asked me “don’t you want to know the development needs”, “I said “yea absolutely if you do have one”. There ended my tenure with the company. Based on this experience, I made sure that whenever, I jumped jobs, I wanted to go to a company which had some appraisal system in place. The second company I joined was slightly better. They gave me five reasons why I was not getting promoted compared to none in my previous organization. In that sense, I thought I was making the right kind of choices to progress in my career.
So when I joined xxx, one of the first things to strike me was the system that was in place. It was called a c3 at that time, but it sounded fancy, though I didn’t know what they did with it. As it evolved over the years, I understood that progression in your career doesn’t necessarily mean that you get a change in titles. It means that you are able to take lot more responsibilities and do different things than what you did a year back. As I look back at my career with xxx, that’s what I think is the most obvious thing. I have been able to do different things over the years and the title never really came in the way and thankfully I need not say yes to my boss all the time. I became a fan of the system here which not only emphasized on the detailed feedback but also on career progression. I was able to appreciate this better since I had seen the other two. Progression, not only in terms of the title changes, but meaning changes in the work. The company did not at any point in time allow the title to come in the way of good work. That was important, as it keeps everybody occupied.
