Stop Skipping Steps: How to Truly Get Ready for Your Next Promotion in Higher Education
Jan 17, 2026If you’ve been told that you need to be “working at the next level already” before you can be promoted, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common pieces of advice in Higher Education, but most people go about it the wrong way.
They wonder if they’re ready, then rush to “prove” it with a vague conversation about progression with their manager. That usually ends in frustration, because the conversation feels flimsy and unconvincing.
There’s a better way. Instead of leaping from doubt to persuasion, slow down and follow these six steps.
1) Understand what “working at the next level” really means
It’s rarely about doing more tasks or delivering more projects. At higher grades, progression is about your thinking, your approach, and how you influence others. My Hidden Curriculum Grade Guides break this down for each grade from Manager to Leader in Professional Services roles, and you can download yours for free.
2) Assess whether you’re already there
You might feel ready, but self-perception and reality don’t always align. I’ve created scorecards to give you a quick sense of whether you’re genuinely demonstrating the next-level behaviours, or whether there’s still development work to do.
You can find the scorecards here:
Ready for Leadership scorecard (Head of Service/AD level)
Ready for Senior Management scorecard (Managing a large team/portfolio)
3 & 4) Level up your thinking and approaches
This is where most of the work lies, and where my programmes The Grounded Lead and Getting Ready for Senior Management programme focuses. The transition isn’t just about skills or experience. It’s about how you make decisions, communicate with authority, handle conflict, and approach complexity. The Hidden Curriculum shows you what these shifts look like at each grade boundary, then the programmes are where you hone those thought processes and approaches.
5) Build the evidence to back yourself
Panels and managers respond to evidence, but gathering it isn’t just a technical task. It’s an act of self-belief and self-trust. You need to be able to recognise, record, and present the times when you’ve already demonstrated the higher-level thinking, approaches and behaviours.
6) Go for it
Once you’ve done the work of steps 1–5, your conversation with a line manager shifts completely. It’s no longer a hesitant “I think I might be ready…” chat. It becomes a grounded, sturdy conversation where you can clearly describe your capability and back yourself with confidence and conviction.
What happens when you do this?
Across the last two rounds of The Grounded Manager programme, which doesn’t even focus directly on promotion but heavily on steps 3 and 4, 60% of participants landed either a new job or a promotion during the programme.
When you level up your thinking and approaches to the tricky stuff of work, people notice. More importantly, you notice. You feel clearer, more capable, and more credible. That conviction is what makes you stand out as the obvious candidate at interview.
So stop skipping steps. Build that sturdy, grounded place inside yourself first. From there, regrading conversations or job applications aren’t leaps into the unknown, they’re natural next steps that you’re fully ready for.
Next step for you:
Download your free Hidden Curriculum Grade Guide and try the scorecard. You’ll get instant insight into where you stand now and what you need to focus on to get promotion-ready.
Ready for Leadership scorecard
Ready for Senior Management scorecard
Check out the programme: Getting Ready for Senior Management or The Grounded Leader
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