Why not just try to get promoted at work instead of an MBA?

Why not just try to get promoted at work instead of an MBA?

This has two parts: generally speaking, and then about my situation.

In General

To decide between work or more school, I feel that everyone needs to know a couple things about themselves & their own situation.

First, it doesn't matter how much you make if you don’t even know what you’re earning money for.  You need to understand what your long-term goals and expectations are, so you can discover what kind of income is necessary to reach whatever goals you have.

How much income & what kind of lifestyle do you need to have an empowered, low-stress life? (Yes, you can still be happy in poverty, but I’m talking about your goal… and I assume it’s not poverty.) What amount will you need to be saving for your idea of retirement, for the needs of your family, and what kind of income does that require? What kind of debt are you willing to have 5, 10, or 20 years from now? Can you pay for all the schooling, housing, insurances, proximity to relatives, vacation days, or anything you consider a “necessity”?

Money isn’t the source of happiness, but things like proximity to family & friends, serving others, etc can be more likely to happen when your own life isn’t a mess. Surveys suggest that a person’s happiness doesn’t get significantly higher after earning above $80k a year. Take that with a grain of salt, as everyone is different, and the survey didn’t control of a person’s size of family or cost-of-living.

The point is it’s unwise to have expectations on what kind of life-style you’re going to have, but have absolutely no idea if it’s reachable based on the track that you’re on. I read a book about this guy who said ‘which of you intending to build a tower sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?’*

Second, once you take a realistic look at your desires and their cost, then you need to look at how realistic the opportunity is where you’re working at, and the type of work you’re doing. Not just with where you work, but with your knowledge, experience and skills.

With work, identify what roles earn the income you discovered you need. Then see who are in those role: are they old-timers who performed well while waiting 10 years for the chance to come along, or are they really skilled, or the boss’s family member? If no one really makes the income your goals require, that’s an indication. If the only decent roles incomes & at work are for those who performed well and waited 10+ years, that’s also an indication.

Whoa… Brennen, slow down. It’s normal to have to wait 10 years for the better job. Yes, but you’re not considering the cost of waiting 10 years when you could obtain that same role/income in 3 years.  If you have to wait 15 years to make what your goals require, then I hope you’ve taken that into account when you calculated how much you need to earn with the timeframe you have to earn it.

Third, you need to consider the market value of the work you do. Do you have some valuable skills? Do you do significantly better than the other people who do your same job? Or are you easily replaceable? Is you job still going to be there and pay just as much 15 years from now? As awesome as you are, as good of a person you are, and as deserving of a person you are, job salaries tend to be based on 2 things: (1) how valuable & needed are your skills, and (2) are there too many or too few people that do what you can do?

So in general, if you need to decide between better jobs & income at the place you’re working at, I feel the best approach is to think about the bigger picture, and consider your opportunities, and consider how realistic it is to reach your goals with your current plan.

For Me & My Personal Experience

I really enjoyed working at Fidelity, however the paths that were available to me were just higher-level customer service jobs or micro-management of lower-level customer service employees. I could have pursued the Financial Planner route (a position called an ‘Account Executive’), but I had just come from Financial Planning and had a good understanding of what that route was like. My department director told me the new-hire licensing route I wanted to pursue at Fidelity would not be available to me or anyone from my department, which further limited my options.

I need to be fair and say there were advancement options that I qualified for that were outside of the call center. They just weren't the type of jobs that offered the learning I was looking for. If I got one of the coveted non-call center promotions, I still wouldn't be planning large projects, not creating business processes, doing my own investigations into large sets of data, not managing a team working on a single project, building any sophisticated Excel models, etc. I would not be making decisions for the company, but only for a client.

Advancement in a Fidelity call center is an interesting thing. Advancement is in pretty small steps there, but it can be pretty quick if you perform well. However, once you’ve gone 2 or 3 small steps there are some pretty big hurdles to getting the next significant advancement into a position where you actually have a small amount of decision-making ability or managerial responsibility.

One hurdle is that Fidelity is a very ‘lean’ company, meaning they have found about every way to reduce labor costs. One way is to temporarily promote people in their job duties but not give them a raise or permanent position in the higher-tier work. It’s called being on ‘loan’ to another department. Everyone who gets ‘promoted’ to a loan position for 6, 12 or even 18 months do the next tier of work without getting a raise, then go back to their previous job once they are no longer needed by the department or if they didn’t make the cut to be hired full-time. Because of the very seasonal and flexible staffing needs at a financial services call center, the majority of employees return to their previous position at the end of their loan.  So hypothetically, if I did just totally crush it and get all the best promotions, it would take an enormous amount of time of being in a very lean system. My costs of missing other opportunities were much larger than the benefit of staying years and years and hoping my train would come in at Fidelity.

I wanted to advance into the training and licensing department, but I mentioned my department director wouldn’t let anyone from my department move into the training department that helps get new-hires get their stockbroker’s licenses. I got a 3-month loan into training, but afterwards the needs of that department were so seasonal and unpredictable that everyone on loan got sent back to their old jobs or otherwise left the company.

The people at Fidelity are fantastic and nothing but a pleasure to work with and even hang out with, but those that advance full time into the first level of management (after paying their dues ‘on loan’) tend to be those who have no better alternative: unrelated undergraduate degrees, just high-school diplomas, or skills that only apply to lower-paying jobs. Because the skills needed at Fidelity are not technical, and the supply of willing employees his high, the wages are somewhat suppressed.

So overall, it’s a good company to advance in for specific people with different long-term goals than me. Our costs of foregoing other opportunities was bigger than benefits of working there in the long-term.

*(Luke 14:28)