You’re putting in the hours. You’re solving tickets faster than anyone on your team. You stay late when things break. You’ve even earned a certification or two on your own time.

And yet, somehow, that promotion keeps going to someone else.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody in IT management wants to say out loud: hard work, by itself, doesn’t get you promoted. It keeps you employed. There’s a difference.

The tech industry has a promotion problem. According to Ravio’s 2026 Compensation Trends Report, engineering promotion rates dropped to 3.7% last year—down over 5% from the previous year. That means roughly 96 out of 100 engineers didn’t advance. Not because they weren’t skilled. Not because they weren’t working hard. Because the system for getting promoted in IT is fundamentally misunderstood.

This isn’t going to be another “work harder and believe in yourself” article. Instead, let’s look at why IT promotions actually happen, what’s blocking yours, and the specific strategies that work when everything else hasn’t.

Why Your Hard Work Isn’t Enough

The most common complaint from stuck IT professionals sounds something like this: “I’ve been doing great work for three years. My boss always says I’m doing well. But nothing changes.”

There’s a reason for that disconnect, and it’s not that your boss is lying or that the company doesn’t value you.

The Visibility Problem

In tech, there’s a pervasive belief that good work speaks for itself. It doesn’t.

Good work that nobody sees is invisible work. And invisible work doesn’t get promoted—it gets exploited. You become the reliable one who handles the fires, which means you’re too valuable exactly where you are.

This is especially brutal in remote and hybrid environments. When your manager doesn’t physically see you grinding through a complex migration or debugging a nightmare infrastructure issue, that work might as well not exist. A study from LinkedIn found that 85% of jobs are filled through networking. The corollary: advancement often depends on who knows about your work, not just the quality of it.

The “Too Good to Promote” Trap

Here’s something your manager probably won’t admit: sometimes they don’t want to promote you because you’re too useful where you are.

If you’re the person who makes their job easier—who handles the escalations, who knows where all the documentation lives, who can be relied on to fix things nobody else can fix—then promoting you creates a problem for them. They’d have to find and train your replacement. They’d lose their go-to person.

This manifests as vague feedback. “You’re doing great, just keep it up.” “Not quite ready yet, but you’re on the right track.” Translation: I need you where you are. (If you’re wondering whether your help desk role has hit this point, check the signs it’s time to leave help desk.)

The Promotion Lag

Tech promotions are lagging indicators. You don’t get promoted to do the work of the next level—you get promoted after you’ve already been doing that work for six months to a year.

This is backwards from how most people think about career advancement. They assume: get promoted, then learn the new responsibilities. In reality: demonstrate you can handle those responsibilities consistently, then get the title that matches what you’re already doing.

Research from Pave confirms this pattern. At minimum, you need to maintain next-level performance for 6-12 months before a promotion happens. You’re essentially working a job you haven’t been given yet.

What Actually Gets People Promoted

If hard work alone isn’t the answer, what is? Let’s break down what consistently moves IT careers forward.

Impact Over Output

Output is how many tickets you close. Impact is whether closing those tickets actually mattered.

Every IT professional can tell me how busy they are. Few can articulate what their work accomplished for the business. But that articulation, connecting technical work to business outcomes, separates people who get promoted from people who stay stuck.

Ask yourself: Can you explain what happened because of your work? Not what you did, but what changed? Revenue protected. Downtime prevented. Hours saved for other teams. Security risks eliminated. If you can’t connect your technical work to outcomes someone outside IT would care about, you have a visibility problem.

This doesn’t mean you need to suddenly become a business analyst. It means framing your work differently. Instead of “I implemented automated backup verification,” try “I reduced our potential data loss window from 24 hours to 4 hours, which means if ransomware hits, we lose one morning’s work instead of a full business day.”

Strategic Relationship Building

Networking has a bad reputation. It sounds slimy, like brown-nosing or playing politics instead of just doing your job well.

But here’s what networking actually means in practice: making sure the people who influence your career know who you are and what you’re capable of.

That includes your direct manager, but it also includes:

  • Your skip-level manager (your boss’s boss). They often have more influence over promotion decisions than your direct manager does.
  • Leaders in adjacent departments. If the VP of Engineering has heard your name positively from the DevOps lead and the Security team, that matters when promotion discussions happen.
  • HR and People Operations. They’re often in the room when promotions are discussed, and they pay attention to who’s contributing beyond their immediate team.

This doesn’t require being fake or political. It requires being intentional about who knows your work exists. Send your skip-level a monthly update email. Volunteer for cross-functional projects. Present your team’s work at all-hands meetings when the opportunity comes up. (For more on this, see our guide on LinkedIn profile optimization for IT professionals—your internal visibility strategy should mirror your external one.)

Solving Problems Nobody Asked You to Solve

The fastest way to demonstrate senior-level thinking is to identify and solve problems outside your job description.

Entry-level and mid-level professionals execute tasks they’re assigned. Senior-level professionals notice what’s broken, what’s risky, what could be better. And they fix it without waiting for permission.

This doesn’t mean going rogue on projects. It means bringing solutions, not just problems. “I noticed our deployment process has this bottleneck. I’ve prototyped a fix and tested it in staging. Here’s what it would take to implement it properly.” That’s senior-level behavior, regardless of your current title.

The key is picking the right problems to solve. Focus on things that:

  • Are visible to leadership
  • Have clear, measurable impact
  • Don’t step on anyone’s territory in a way that creates enemies
  • Demonstrate skills at the next level, not just your current level

Building a home lab is one way to develop this skill outside work—you identify problems, architect solutions, and document results without waiting for permission.

Documentation as Career Investment

Here’s an underrated promotion strategy: become the person who documents things.

When you document a process, you’re doing three things at once: proving you understand it, creating something useful for the organization, and putting your name in front of everyone who ever reads that doc. Good documentation shows you can think beyond your own tasks. It shows you can teach, which is a leadership skill.

More practically, documentation reduces your own replaceability in a healthy way. You’re not hoarding knowledge (which makes you a liability). You’re sharing knowledge (which makes you a leader). That’s a promotion-ready signal.

If your team uses a wiki or knowledge base, become a regular contributor. If they don’t, build one. The IT documentation best practices we’ve covered elsewhere apply directly here.

When the Problem Is Your Company, Not You

Sometimes the reason you’re not getting promoted has nothing to do with your performance. Sometimes the problem is structural.

No Room to Grow

Many IT organizations are flat. There might be a handful of senior positions, and the people in them aren’t leaving. You can do everything right and still not advance because there’s literally nowhere to advance to.

According to Techneeds research, tech promotions typically happen within 1-3 years. If you’ve been in your role significantly longer than that with positive feedback but no advancement, the issue might be the ceiling above you, not your own limitations.

Signs your company might have a growth problem:

  • The same people have held senior positions for 5+ years with no turnover
  • There’s no documented career ladder or clear criteria for advancement
  • Promotions happen rarely and seem random when they do
  • HR gives you vague answers when you ask about growth opportunities

This is especially common at MSPs and smaller shops. If you’re stuck in this situation, the help desk to sysadmin progression guide covers how to level up even when your company doesn’t have a clear path.

Bad Management

Some managers don’t advocate for their team. They take credit for wins and deflect blame for losses. They don’t bring up their reports in leadership meetings. They don’t fight for budget to promote people.

If your manager isn’t actively working to develop and advance their team, you have two options: find a different manager within the company (internal transfers) or find a different company.

This isn’t about having a “bad” boss in the sense of being abusive or incompetent. Many managers are perfectly nice people who simply don’t prioritize career development for their team. The impact on your career is the same either way.

The Job-Hop Reality

Here’s the uncomfortable math: internal promotions at most companies come with 10-15% salary increases. External offers for the next level up often come with 20-30% increases.

Data from multiple sources confirms what most IT professionals already suspect: the fastest way to advance is often to change employers. Internal promotion means waiting for a spot to open, proving yourself over extended periods, and navigating organizational politics. External moves mean interviewing for the role you want directly.

This isn’t an argument that you should always job-hop. There’s value in tenure, in institutional knowledge, in relationships built over time. But if you’ve been stuck for years despite doing everything right, applying externally isn’t giving up—it’s using leverage. Our salary negotiation guide covers how to use competing offers effectively.

Building a Promotion Case

If you decide to pursue promotion at your current company, approach it like a project with deliverables.

Know the Criteria

Before anything else, find out exactly what’s required for promotion. Many companies have documented career ladders with specific competencies for each level. If yours does, get it. Study it. Map your current work against it.

If your company doesn’t have documented criteria, ask directly: “What specific accomplishments or skills would I need to demonstrate to be considered for [next level]?” Get it in writing if possible. This creates accountability and gives you a clear target.

Build a Promotion Document

Throughout the year, maintain a running document of your accomplishments. Include:

  • Quantified impact: Numbers, percentages, dollar amounts when possible
  • Scope expansion: Projects that were bigger or more complex than your typical work
  • Leadership signals: Mentoring junior team members, leading initiatives, cross-team collaboration
  • Skills growth: New technologies learned, certifications earned, training completed

When promotion conversations happen, you should be able to point to specific evidence, not rely on memory or hope your manager remembers that thing you did eight months ago. (This is similar to how you’d build an IT resume that actually gets interviews—concrete results, not vague claims.)

Set a Timeline

Give your promotion pursuit a deadline. “I want to be promoted to Senior by Q3” or “I need to see meaningful progress toward advancement within the next 12 months.”

This creates urgency. It also gives you a decision point. If you hit your timeline without progress, you have data to decide: keep waiting, or start looking elsewhere.

Share this timeline with your manager: “I’m focused on reaching [next level] within the next year. Can we work together on what I need to accomplish to make that happen?” This shows you’re serious and invites them to be part of the solution.

Ask for Feedback Regularly

Don’t wait for annual reviews to find out where you stand. Request specific feedback monthly or quarterly: “On a scale of 1-10, how ready am I for promotion to [next level]? What would move that number up?”

This approach does several things:

  • It keeps your promotion goal visible to your manager
  • It surfaces blockers early (before they’ve cost you a year)
  • It demonstrates the kind of proactive communication that itself is a senior-level skill
  • It creates a paper trail if you later need to demonstrate that you were actively working toward advancement

The Skills That Actually Matter for Advancement

Technical skills get you hired. But they won’t get you promoted alone. The skills that matter at senior levels are the ones nobody teaches in bootcamps or certification courses.

Communication

Can you explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders? Can you write documentation that people actually read? Can you run a meeting that reaches conclusions instead of meandering?

Communication skills for IT professionals are the biggest differentiator between mid-level and senior-level. Technical brilliance matters less as you advance. The ability to translate, persuade, and get people on the same page? That becomes everything.

Judgment

Senior roles require making decisions with incomplete information. Not “what does the documentation say” but “given what we know, what’s the right call?” This kind of thinking shows up constantly in technical interviews and promotion conversations alike.

This is hard to develop except through experience. But you can accelerate it by seeking out ambiguous situations rather than avoiding them. Volunteer for projects where the right answer isn’t obvious. Practice making recommendations and defending them.

Prioritization

When everything is urgent, what do you work on? Junior professionals execute the list they’re given. Senior professionals determine what should be on the list in the first place.

Demonstrating prioritization means saying no to low-value work, spotting the high-impact opportunities, and making trade-offs openly rather than pretending you can do everything.

Teaching and Mentoring

The clearest signal that someone is ready for senior-level is their ability to elevate others. Can you help junior team members grow? Can you transfer your knowledge effectively?

Find opportunities to mentor formally or informally. Pair program with junior developers. Offer to onboard new team members. Create training materials. Every interaction where you help someone else develop is evidence of senior-level behavior. If you’re eyeing management specifically, the IT manager career path guide breaks down what that transition looks like.

Building Skills That Get Noticed

While soft skills matter for advancement, you still need technical credibility. The key is building skills strategically.

For hands-on practice that actually translates to job performance, platforms like Shell Samurai let you build real command-line muscle memory in scenarios that mirror actual work. The difference between “I’ve read about Linux administration” and “I can confidently troubleshoot in a terminal” is the difference between someone who talks about senior skills and someone who demonstrates them.

If you’re moving toward cloud or DevOps, hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP matters more than certificates about them. Build something. Break it. Document what you learned. That’s the portfolio that gets you promoted. Or hired elsewhere for more money.

FAQ: IT Promotion Questions

How long should I wait for a promotion before looking elsewhere?

In tech, promotions typically happen within 1-3 years according to industry research. If you’ve been in your role for 2+ years with consistently positive feedback but no advancement—and you’ve explicitly asked about promotion paths—it’s reasonable to start exploring external options. That doesn’t mean leaving immediately; it means understanding your market value and what other opportunities exist. The IT interview questions guide can help you prepare if you decide to test the waters.

Should I tell my manager I’m looking at other jobs?

Generally, no. The exception is if you have a high-trust relationship with your manager and believe they’ll advocate for you rather than start planning your replacement. In most cases, keep your job search private until you have an offer in hand. At that point, you can use it as leverage for internal advancement if you prefer to stay—though be prepared for them to let you go rather than counter-offer.

What if my company doesn’t have a clear career ladder?

This is unfortunately common, especially at smaller companies and MSPs. In the absence of formal criteria, create your own. Research what senior-level roles at other companies require. Build a case based on industry standards, not just your company’s vague expectations. You can also use this as an opportunity to propose a career ladder to HR—which itself demonstrates senior-level organizational thinking.

Does getting another certification help with promotions?

Certifications help with external job searches more than internal promotions. Your current employer already knows your capabilities; they don’t need a certificate to prove them. That said, strategic certifications can signal commitment to a specialty and create conversation opportunities about career direction. The Security+ certification path is a good example—it signals interest in security roles even if your current job is more generalist. Just don’t expect a cert to automatically trigger a promotion.

How do I get promoted if my manager keeps leaving?

Manager turnover is brutal for career advancement because your new manager doesn’t know your history, your accomplishments, or your career goals. When you get a new manager, immediately schedule time to discuss your career trajectory. Bring your promotion document. Be explicit about where you want to go. You have to restart the relationship-building process, but you can accelerate it by being proactive.

The Honest Truth

Getting promoted in IT isn’t fair. It’s not purely meritocratic. It doesn’t always reward the hardest workers or the most technically skilled.

But it’s also not random. The people who advance consistently share certain habits. They make their work visible. They build relationships with people who influence decisions. They solve problems nobody asked them to solve. And they actively manage their own careers rather than waiting for someone else to do it for them.

If you’re stuck, the first step is honest assessment. Is the problem your approach, your skills, your visibility, or your company? Different diagnoses require different solutions. Sometimes you need to change your strategy. Sometimes you need to change your job. (The sysadmin to DevOps transition guide is one example of how to level up by shifting direction, not just waiting for promotion.)

Either way, waiting and hoping isn’t a career strategy. The promotion you want is available to you—but you’ll need to do more than just work hard to get it.