Here’s a piece of unsolicited career advice: have recurrent 1:1s with your direct manager, set objectives and clear expectations, discuss the major struggles you have with them, and define action points to resolve them. Do this throughout the year. Take notes.

Then, every 12 months, do a quick reflection on all notes taken and do a self-review with expectations for the career review, and send it to your manager. This will greatly help them clearly understand if a career progression should happen.

The idea is to have a continuous alignment between both parties and for the career review to not be a complete surprise. The big mistake is to wait until the last minute to do all this and get surprised or, worst, not understand why it didn’t align with our expectations.