Not much opportunities in large companies

I realize this is a blanket statement which isn't always true.... With that said I found that I have a harder time getting promoted in larger companies, weird right?

Not that I have become some wildly successful careerist, but have fared much better in mid sized corporations, 100 - 2500 people.

I'm in a monolith at the moment and extremely silo'd. Don't get me wrong the work is CHALLENGING and valuable for future endeavours, but narrow. Think of the opposite of the CISSP, a mile wild the depth an inch. Well in this case, it's the complete opposite, 25 miles deep and I am dead serious but a foot wide.

Any one else experience this? I would think the larger the enterprise the more opportunities, I guess it's like every thing in life, it depends.

I deal in Business Intelligence as a junior architect, analyst, tester, requirements analyst etc.... Several hats all in the BI space but I am finding the opportunity to move up becoming more challenging.

For instance in order to move into "Big Date" aka Hadoop, NOSQL etc... AWS/Azure experience seems to be required along with strong knowledge of Linux. No dice there.......

Management is always a possibility but I've been there done that, not really where I want to go...

I suppose at one time or another we all reach our limits one time in our life.....

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yoba222

That was the strong vibe I got in my stint as a business systems analyst at one particular large company -- it was the beginning of a path to becoming an expert on very corporatey, proprietary, and very Windows-dependent vendor software. That would have been my career path, no matter how hard or lazy I might have been, until the 10 or so year point, at which I could seek a managerial role. Not because of my management abilities, but because 10 years had passed. There were many nothing-special managers working there.

These days I prefer the opportunities that come with the volatility of a small company to the stability of big and boring. I wonder if trendy tech companies are vastly different though.

DatabaseHead

yoba222 wrote: »

That was the strong vibe I got in my stint as a business systems analyst at one particular large company -- it was the beginning of a path to becoming an expert on very corporatey, proprietary, and very Windows-dependent vendor software. That would have been my career path, no matter how hard or lazy I might have been, until the 10 or so year point, at which I could seek a managerial role. Not because of my management abilities, but because 10 years had passed. There were many nothing-special managers working there.

These days I prefer the opportunities that come with the volatility of a small company to the stability of big and boring. I wonder if trendy tech companies are vastly different though.

I appreciate the follow up. Your reply is almost as if we worked at the same company

I myself like the volatility too. I don't have a problem delivering for companies in pretty much any of the roles in the data space.

Your comments about the beginning of a path to becoming an expert on a very corporate prioritary windows etc..... system

May I ask? How long where you in that role for before you said adios?

PS tried to give you rep but evidently I already have recently...

DZA_

In my organization, culture plays a large factor to way that we have career progression/development. First off, there are plenty of internal positions that are always open in the ITS department (horizontal and vertical). The company recommends employees to progress their careers within the organization; providing training, sending them on conferences and even establishing a mentoring program. To an certain extent, you could even negotiate with your manager to even do job shadowing for a role that might interests you.

Secondly, what I find a unique and a blessing at the same time is that your manager advocates for finding you a new role if you planning to switch roles internally or move to a more senior role after your 2 years of service in your current position. They can't necessarily stop you unless they have a totally legitimate reason but they will take the time to assist to have that transition. I have yet to gone through this process but will bring it up to my manager once I have made the two year mark.

P.S. My organization size is 80k+ with an ITS department of a few thousand bodies.

Cheers,

TechGromit

I really haven't found that true where I work, a Fortune 100 company with 30k employees. There's been quite a bit of movement recently, only few promotions, but a lot of people moving around in IT taking on different roles. How does your employer value it's employees? Is there training available? My employer has spent quite a bit of $ in training the last few years, I think they place a higher value hiring from within.

DZA_ wrote: »

Secondly, what I find a unique and a blessing at the same time is that your manager advocates for finding you a new role if you planning to switch roles internally or move to a more senior role after your 2 years of service in your current position.

This might be why you feel this way, for some reason Millennials feel some type of entitlement after two years they deserve a promotion. Sadly this isn't how the real world works. Where I work Salary Position levels go E02, E03, E04 (manager), E05 (Senior manager), E05 (Director) and so on. There really isn't a lot of E03 positions open to move up to, and every E03 has first pick of a E03 opening first. They only reason I was able to move up to a E03 positions after 3 years with the company is I agreed to take a job in Siberia (Up state NY), most people avoid colder weather locations. Some people try to get a E03 promotion for decades and don't succeed. Don't get me wrong, there still plenty of raises, bonuses, training opportunities and other perks, but few 20k bumps in salary promotions.

LordQarlyn

Interestingly enough, I worked for a small company, but on a US Army NETCOM contract, which is about as big as an enterprise network as one can get. Definitely siloed in little boxes, and the GS government employees would slap contractors down if we dared step out of our little box, even to assist a major outage we had the skills to fix. Was my least favorite IT job, too pigeonholed and little to no training opportunities.

I think in the end it all depends on the company culture. Here, it's a small autonomous contract on a midsized company (~20,000 employees worldwide) and I definitely find myself managing almost all aspects of IT and personnel. I've heard of smaller companies where movement never happens unless someone dies. I've heard of big companies with high turnover and constantly dynamic activity.

DatabaseHead

LordQarlyn wrote: »

Interestingly enough, I worked for a small company, but on a US Army NETCOM contract, which is about as big as an enterprise network as one can get. Definitely siloed in little boxes, and the GS government employees would slap contractors down if we dared step out of our little box, even to assist a major outage we had the skills to fix. Was my least favorite IT job, too pigeonholed and little to no training opportunities.

I think in the end it all depends on the company culture. Here, it's a small autonomous contract on a midsized company (~20,000 employees worldwide) and I definitely find myself managing almost all aspects of IT and personnel. I've heard of smaller companies where movement never happens unless someone dies. I've heard of big companies with high turnover and constantly dynamic activity.

I don't want to come off ungrateful or annoyed.... Just an observation I have noticed in this current company. Maybe people are so content in this company people don't move a lot. Previously I was in another fortune 100 and they did have a lot of job openings for certain jobs, but... the quality of life there was awful. (In fact it was always rated at the bottom according to Us News in employee satisfaction).

Either way I appreciate all the feedback I find this topic to be interesting.

DZA_

TechGromit wrote: »

This might be why you feel this way, for some reason Millennials feel some type of entitlement after two years they deserve a promotion. Sadly this isn't how the real world works. Where I work Salary Position levels go E02, E03, E04 (manager), E05 (Senior manager), E05 (Director) and so on. There really isn't a lot of E03 positions open to move up to, and every E03 has first pick of a E03 opening first. They only reason I was able to move up to a E03 positions after 3 years with the company is I agreed to take a job in Siberia (Up state NY), most people avoid colder weather locations. Some people try to get a E03 promotion for decades and don't succeed. Don't get me wrong, there still plenty of raises, bonuses, training opportunities and other perks, but few 20k bumps in salary promotions.

That is my generation for you. Although for every time I have gotten a promotion it was always earned, not with how kids are expecting to get raises and promotions on a silver platter every couple of years. I haven't hit a career plateau as of yet. In our organization, they have the individual track which is geared to a technical top gun vs managing engineer (tech stream) vs manager (people stream). Manager's start at band 10. Senior Manager is band 11 and AVP is band 11+.

The compensation bands here are wide enough that they can bump you at the higher end of band 9 vs putting you the next band level. I can see why there are very few 20k salary bumps as they can scale accordingly. If you're looking for a 20k bump that its definitely a signal to jump ship.

I would fit totally perfect in your organization since I work in Toronto, Canada. Working in cold weather is no problem for me!

Cheers,

EANx

TechGromit wrote: »

They only reason I was able to move up to a E03 positions after 3 years with the company is I agreed to take a job in Siberia (Up state NY), most people avoid colder weather locations. Some people try to get a E03 promotion for decades and don't succeed. Don't get me wrong, there still plenty of raises, bonuses, training opportunities and other perks, but few 20k bumps in salary promotions.

You can tell who is hungry and hard-charging and who isn't. "Oh, I definitely want that promotion! As long as I don't have to move or change my hours."

Same organization for the last 14 years, an organization with over 50k employees. Five promotions. Some places value internal talent, others don't. My employer is slightly out of the norm so training people in WHY we do what we do is extra effort that doesn't need to be expended when promoting internally. Just a guess but I'd say that internal promotions might be a bit easier in firms that are truly global (say 100+ countries) than not.

TechGromit

DZA_ wrote: »

That is my generation for you.

I think those participation trophies have something to do with it. Show up to play the game, here's a trophy for you. One of the benefits of sports was it taught children to be competitive. You had to work hard to get that first place trophy. This translated well in the business world. Now everyone is a winner. We wouldn't want to hurt any child's feelings. Unfortunately in the long run it's a real disservice to children, I showed up for work every day for two years, where's my participation promotion?

DatabaseHead

From Yoba and I couldn't agree more with this..... (This happens A LOT).

Not because of my management abilities, but because 10 years had passed.

UnixGuy

@Databasehead: you seem to be looking for specific type of experience (Linux, Hadoop, big data,...etc). Those are technical skills and the only way to learn them is by labbing & changing jobs.Those are not skills you get promoted to do

Now with big companies, true silos happen, but you can express your interest in learning a new skill or going to a certain type of training course or move to a different department. it can happen in some places

DatabaseHead

UnixGuy wrote: »

@Databasehead: you seem to be looking for specific type of experience (Linux, Hadoop, big data,...etc). Those are technical skills and the only way to learn them is by labbing & changing jobs.Those are not skills you get promoted to do

Now with big companies, true silos happen, but you can express your interest in learning a new skill or going to a certain type of training course or move to a different department. it can happen in some places

I think you are right, it's going to come to that if I hope to get a chance. The challenge is there is only so much time and a ton to learn

Thanks for your insights.

DZA_

TechGromit wrote: »

Now everyone is a winner. We wouldn't want to hurt any child's feelings. Unfortunately in the long run it's a real disservice to children, I showed up for work every day for two years, where's my participation promotion?

It's a bummer once you peak at getting your trophies. At that point, its more a horizontal jump upwards to another company to reset getting your brownie points and your trophies. You'll be discouraged as you will get older and the motivation will die down. It's a realization that the younger generations will have to earn their trophies early and pretty much settle or be disappointed with their careers later down the road.

Blucodex

Currently in a fortune 10 and it's insane the amount of opportunity we have ATM. Currently going through an entire re-org and culture change.