Nationwide — In every career, the opportunity to achieve a new level of seniority – and a larger wage packet as a result – is what keeps workers pushing harder to do the best work possible. It’s a system that rewards hard work, whether you’re in retail, hospitality, business, or manufacturing. Nonetheless, it’s not hard work alone that’ll earn you promotions in your manufacturing career: you need to focus on a number of objectives to really impress your superiors. In this guide, you’ll learn how you can earn promotions more quickly over the course of your career in manufacturing.
While hard work is something that all ambitious employees should be putting in, it’s another thing entirely to have your hard work be noticed and appreciated by the right people. When you’re working on getting the promotions you think your hard work deserves, you should be keeping track of the best of your work to date, and you should be sharing your work and your achievements with your seniors. You can do this by:
• Scheduling conversations and meetings with your managers to talk about your work
• Sharing your work and your completed projects over email with bosses
• Ensuring that you’re recognized for your contribution to the company’s successes
• Keeping a list of all the best work you’ve done to date, to supply for promotion meetings
• Keeping in touch with employees across your business in order to become well-known and appreciated
All of these elements will feed into your getting noticed by the people who truly matter: those who will remember your name and your work the next time a vacancy appears in your company’s management circles.
Making Contacts
Whether you achieve a promotion in your own company, or you’re hired by a similar company in a higher-paid and more senior role, you stand a better chance of getting promoted if you have the contacts that’ll help you open the door to new opportunities. The workers who are most likely to seize on the opportunities that come their way are those who have made contacts and friends through:
• Attending all work social events, like post-work drinks and team-building trips
• Inviting seniors and managers for dinner or a drink at their home
• Getting seen at industry events, through keynote speeches and seminars
• Being big personalities on the factory floor or in the office
Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, making these contacts should be right up there with your highest priorities over the course of your career. With strong, senior-level contacts, you’ll be able to leverage their knowledge and wisdom when you need them – and you may just find a job offer coming from them, too.
Learning and Training
For individuals with little education and few qualifications to their name, earning a continuous string of promotions can be difficult. When you’re competing against those with college degrees, you’re going to struggle to show that your resume is the strongest out of a lineup of other, more impressive pieces of paper. As such, you need to find ways to study manufacturing management techniques that’ll help show you’re a serious, qualified contender for the role you’re attempting to be promoted to. You can learn more about your field by:
• Attending conferences, workshops, seminars, and talks about manufacturing
• Subscribing to journals and magazines that apply to your particular field
• Talking with senior employees and senior representatives from other companies
• Reading books and online guides about manufacturing and management
• Attending online university courses in order to gain additional knowledge. Click here for more information.
With more to show for yourself on your CV, and more knowledge rattling around in your brain, you’ll be better placed, in interviews, to achieve the promotion that you deserve.
Staying Power
While some workers tend to be over-ambitious, hurling themselves at every promotional opportunity they come across, others are more patient and allow these opportunities to arrive at their doorstep before taking the chance. You need to find the right balance – between eagerness and passivity – for you to secure promotions that you feel you deserve. You’ll know that you deserve a promotion when:
• You’ve been given the nod by a senior member of staff
• You’re regularly praised for your efforts in your role
• You have been given a pay rise recently, without any extra responsibilities
• You’ve been taking on responsibilities without a pay rise
• Your work has continued to improve over the course of the past few months
In all of these cases, you’ll understand when you need to make a move to progress in your career, leading your superiors to take stock of your work and your aptitude and consider you for promotion.
Extra Responsibilities
The final method by which you’ll earn promotion after promotion is by going ‘above and beyond’ in your work. By showing that you’re able to handle more work and juggle more roles, you’ll be actively demonstrating that you’re well-placed for promotion. These new responsibilities are, of course, your leverage when you do come to have those all-important meetings with your manager in your manufacturing role. Keep an eye out for the following responsibilities to add to your role at work:
• Training new staff in their roles, and helping them feel comfortable in your company
• Representing your company wherever you go in a stellar fashion
• Leading a small team and motivating them to hit your targets
• Producing reports on where you might be able to improve your processes
• Aiming to tackle waste and other byproducts within your business
• Taking a course in first aid in order to up the health and safety levels in your facility
By taking on a little more responsibility, and showing that it’s something that you can easily work through, you’ll be demonstrating that you’re committed to the success of your company and that you’re worthy of promotion to a position in which you’ll be able to do further good for the shareholders and for your bosses.
Aim for a higher salary and a role upgrade with regularity by following the promotion tips outlined above, all of which will help you succeed in your career in the manufacturing industry.
