Owning your engineering career progression and some advice from Tom Hanks

Career advancement in engineering is often opaque. Promotion criteria is frequently unclear, inconsistent, or interpreted differently even across teams at the same company(!), making it hard to know whether you’re operating at the level required to grow, and whether or not anyone is recognizing your growth.

I will introduce a practical, repeatable framework for taking ownership of your career progression. Drawing from experience participating in and also designing career ladders across organizations ranging from startups to large enterprises, I’ll walk through how to turn vague expectations into an actionable growth plan and create alignment with your leadership.

You’ll learn how to:

• Translate ambiguous promotion criteria into concrete actions
• Build a career roadmap aligned with your organization’s expectations
• Have productive, low-friction conversations with your manager about advancement
• Document your work and impact in ways that matter for promotion decisions
• Shift from reactive career management to intentional proactive planning

You’ll leave with a system you can apply at any company to create clarity around growth and to advocate effectively for your own progression. While the examples focus on software engineering, the framework applies broadly to technical roles across the industry.

And Tom Hanks has some great advice that I will share with you too!

• Intermediate
• Development
• Soft Skills
• Careers