How can you increase your confidence to land a promotion?

Measuring what you've accomplished and how is essential when preparing your case for your own promotion. It's no longer good enough to say you've met your goals. Have you completed them ahead of schedule? Within or below the given budget? What do your customers say? How did you work with your peers, project team and clients? How you performed your work on a higher level, the level where you want to be promoted to? Answering questions like these will strengthen your position.

Two parts here: 1) The development of self worth and belief in personal/professional value and 2) Keeping track of achievements and giving yourself credit for your professional accomplishments. If you are solid on #1 then you are likely further along than most. Journaling on both the good and the bad helps provide real evidence of growth and perspective on how you can use historical learnings to evolve professionally. Promotions are a function of budget, availability, and timing. Preparing yourself by constantly tracking growth and using that documentation of learnings will necessarily translate into preparedness when the time is right. Good luck!

Increasing your confidence to garner a promotion within an organization starts with increasing the humility necessary to acknowledge personal opportunities and areas where growth is needed. Confidence in what you’re capable of creating and being willing to actively seek out feedback is a true sign of the readiness for greater opportunity.

Sometimes this is hampered by the absence of clear communication between the individual and the company (managers). Having a clear vision and communicating it to stakeholders is something that I often see clients struggle with. Transparency requires work but is crucial in order to create success.

Growth mindset is popping up all over. For me it’s the key to being successful, wherever and whenever you want. I’ve always believed I could figure things out, make good decisions and get good outcomes. Confidence comes with experience. The more you do, the more you grow, the more value you deliver. The more value you deliver, other people’s confidence in you grows. It’s a beautiful cycle. Doing is the strongest way to build your confidence. I feel a bit of an imposter writing about asking for a promotion because I’ve never done it (never asked for a raise either). I’ve cultivated the mindset to try, to learn and to listen. Absolute must haves for building confidence and for helping others have confidence in you.

A growth mindset requires believing in yourself and letting go of fear of rejection. In many cases interpersonal relationships at work are delicate and need to be built up step by step. But if we don't actively seek external support this growth mindset cannot be fully deployed in practice.

Promotions in the IT world are often considered based on your contribution towards deliverables. To contribute effectively, one must always focus on improving competencies and attitude, so that both of these aspects complement each other. When your competencies are in balance with your attitude, your performance will naturally be high. With higher performance, you will feel confident to ask for a promotion or assured that you will be recognized for a promotion without asking. To improve both competencies and attitude, you need to be driven towards continuous self-improvement. Target beyond your boundaries and always aim to give it your best shot!

To develop the confidence to go for a promotion you first need to work on your level of courage. Courage will always drive your level of confidence. When you step outside of your comfort zone and find success, your confidence levels will also grow. The more you develop self-trust in your abilities, the more you will convey a level of confidence that leaders will find attractive.

I hesitate to post this, at the risk of sounding excessively pragmatic. But by far the best concept you should grasp --that will underpin your confidence more than any mind trick-- is leverage. Quite simply, if you ask for a promotion or a pay rise at a time when business is struggling and your team is overstaffed, the cards are not in your favour. But let's imagine: Your team recently suffered a few resignations, business is healthy, and you have a rival employer trying to seduce you. Now you have leverage. If you're able to create leverage for yourself, it will immediately feed into your confidence. And your chance of a promotion will skyrocket.