a career whinge

[aclivity]

I'm using the good folks of YD as the target for a bit of whinge, I'm feeling a little unhappy at present but not unhappy enough to take it to HR or management as a formal issue ... basically I just want to stamp my feet and shake my tiny fist for a while.

I changed jobs (aka took redundancy and started in a new company) about 16 months ago, and went from a management role managing 30 or so people in 3 teams of different technical skills (DBA's, Developers, Knowledge Managers) to a technical solution designer role. Dropping the management responsibility was a good thing at the time, but I was told during the interview phase and repeatedly through the last 16 months that the manager of the team I was in wanted me to take on some of the management roles, and I developed some policies and tools for resource management on his behalf.

Thanks to workload on the technical elements of my role, I was unable to do any more 'self promotion' than this, I suppose I should have given my career development a higher priority than just delivering the project work that I was employed to do.

Anyway, my immediate manager has been promoted - well done him, he was a very good manager and I think he deserved it. As a result, the team manager position was vacated. I expected that it would be opened up for applications both from within the team and other potential candidates internally. This was not the case - one of my colleagues has been put in as the new manager.

My whinge, then, is that I have been led to believe that my experience of managing disparate technical teams was one of the reasons I was employed. All thorugh the last 16 months I have been told that I was seen as the senior member of the team. It turns out that this was just so much smoke being blown up my @rse. As a result I'm feeling a little demoralised / demotivated and I don't really want to work for this ex-colleague based on my experience of working with him.

Any HR bods here who could advise me on one point of order? In previous companies there has been an almost anal adherence to processes for promotion, even when there was only one person who could EVER do the job, it still had to be advertised and all prospective candidates given an equal chance. Is this a legal process, or was it just those company procedures? There are some confusing policies published at this company, one about succession planning (one person can be selected as the succesor to a role) and another includes the advice that "Existing colleagues will be invited to apply for promotion opportunities wherever appropriate and subject to their eligibility". This is also demoralising - am I either not appropriate (so why the smoke up my @rse) or ineligible (why?).

Whinge over. Back on my head, tea break's over.

[Conor]

SOrry to hear about this mate, especially cos I am in almost exactly the same position.

AFAIK the company only needs to adhere to its own policies in this regard, although this rule may be dependant on the size of the company.

Get the beers in and lets rant

[Finless]

Request a meeting with ? to discuss your concerns, remind them of promises(?) made at the interview etc?