What this is: one real promotion, run through all five steps by somebody who isn't me. Erfan Hesami, data engineer, now Lead Data Platform Engineer, with a 22% raise. Everything here comes from what he said on the last live session of this course, and from the self-review he built and then fictionalised so you could see it.

Read it after Step 5 as the whole pipeline run once. Or read it before Step 1, if what you need first is proof that this survives a real manager, a real finance team and a reorg landing in the middle of it.

The whole chain

• About seven years in tech before this. Software engineer, a master's in data science, analyst and analytics engineer, then data engineering.
• Every one of those years ended with a good review and the standard increase. He said thank you and never asked for more.
• In his second year at his current company he brought it up himself, at the mid-year review.
• Three months before the annual review, a reorg changed who he reported to.
• He sent his self-review ahead of the meeting. From there it took four conversations over about three weeks.
• The first offer was 12% on top of his salary. He came back with a higher number, with sourced market research behind it.
• Finance approved 22%, and the title.

Seven years of saying thank you

He thought seniority came with age. Stay long enough, get older, and at some point somebody makes you senior, then head of something. So every year went the same way. Positive review, the standard percentage, and a thank you for having him for another year.

I never asked for it.

He doesn't blame the companies he worked for, and I don't either. A manager who never hears you ask has no reason to think you want it. Once Erfan did start asking, his current manager told him he liked that Erfan came in with a goal, and that he likes working with people like that.

If you've taken the standard raise and said thanks two years running, you're on the same track he was on.

Doing the job before the title

This is Step 1, and he was running it long before he called it anything.

He took ownership where nobody had asked him to. The clearest case is governance. The company had AI initiatives going and no governance documentation under them, so he said so, volunteered to write it, and came back with a plan when his manager asked for one. His manager left it with him.

The collecting ran alongside.

• A short weekly update to a semi-technical executive who wanted it brief and had no time. He drafted them with AI. The habit came out of a line in his manager's feedback, "cut all the follow-ups", which he took to mean send the update before anyone has to chase it.