Hi, I'm Helen and I'm Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we talk about the ins, the outs, the ups and the downs of Squiggly Careers and give you a bit of support, some ideas for action so that you can feel a bit more confident and in control of whatever is going on for you at work right now.

And this week we're going to be talking

about the topic of promotion, but we're going to be focusing on how you can make progress with

your career development when you can't get promoted. So within squiggly careers, we want you to all be

really ambitious for where your career can take you. So we are definitely

not anti-promotion. But we also want to be really realistic that as organisations continue to get

flatter, we can't rely on promotions as our only or even our primary opportunity to progress.

And also there are loads of ways of progressing that are really motivating

and meaningful that aren't promotions. So it's partly about giving ourselves the opportunity to zoom out

and to see progression as much more than promotion, but also to recognise that there might be

moments where you do feel stuck or that you're stalling and you would like to get

promoted. That would be your objective number one if you could wave a magic wand. But there are

often reasons outside of your control that means that can't happen. And that can put you in a really

tricky dilemma or it can create a bit of tension, I think, in your squiggly career, because maybe

you love your manager, you love who you work for, maybe you're really enjoying your job, you

really like the culture of the organisation, but you can't get promoted. For whatever reason,

there's no more money, there's not the right role, there's someone in the role that you want

to do, all of those things are the reality of our squiggly careers. So what do we do in those moments? How can we still progress?

When do you think in your career you've been most in this situation where you have wanted to be

promoted, but it hasn't been possible. And there's been this point when that could have and it probably

did feel quite frustrating but you had to make a conscious choice to do something different when

was that like most real for you um what age taught me to give an age or a job i mean i don't

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