Prove yourself with PowerPoint



  • A friend who works in a non-IT field related this to me: In order to get promoted where he works, one is required to compose a PowerPoint presentation which describes why one deserves to be promoted. Has anyone else ever encountered such a policy?



  • Some managers just can't understand anything without pretty pictures and bullet points. If you deserve a promotion, it shouldn't be hard to slap out a few slides bragging about your accomplishments and what you can offer at the next level (basically it's the exact same stuff you'd say facce to face, but with pictures and a wider audience).

    Placate the fool and get promoted - preferably to a position where you work for someone who understands the value of face-to-face communication.

     



  • I've never had to specifically write a PowerPoint presentation, but have had to write up why I deserve to be promoted. Or a little less formally, each year as part of my yearly evaluation, I'm expected to tell my boss what it was I did over the past year. While he was obviously there and participated in some of it, it's a chance to point out details he might not have been aware of like the details of why the solution to a particular problem turned out to be significantly trickier than it first appears. (Or how you did some extra stuff at home because it interests you, and that saved development time at work, or whatever.) It's very common to have to do this sort of thing in large corporations, at least in the US.



  • I don't know if any of you have ever had a review while part of a consulting company.  The person who did my review this year had never worked with me.  He just emailed people who did work with me, got responses, copy pasted quotes from those responses into a Word document, and submitted that to the Powers That Be.  And they wonder why we don't take the reviews seriously.



  • @VGR said:


    A friend who works in a non-IT field related this to me: In order to get promoted where he works, one is required to compose a PowerPoint presentation which describes why one deserves to be promoted. Has anyone else ever encountered such a policy?

    So do they ever have to present it, or just compose it and email it?



  • @db2 said:

    So do they ever have to present it, or just compose it and email it?

    Good question. My guess is that they just e-mail it... and later get raked over the coals like a college hazing, as the supervisor picks it apart and comes up with lame reasons why it isn't good enough and therefore the submitter doesn't deserve the promotion.

    I'm familiar with yearly reviews where I have to describe my accomplishments over the past year, but this isn't the same. This is more like a dangled carrot, a way for management to get a little sadistic pleasure out of making the peons dance. Or maybe I should heed Hanlon's Razor and accept that this is just the natural result of managers who have no clue how to actually evaluate employees.


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