You wrote the deck your director presented last quarter. You wrote the one before that too. When the new analyst gets stuck, she comes to you, and nobody assigned you that job. Your title hasn't moved in a while.
That's the moment most people start drafting the ask. It's also the moment most people get told to wait another cycle, and the reason is usually the same one. They walk in with proof that they're good at their job. Doing your current job well is the price of keeping it. It isn't the argument for the next one.
This checklist is a self-assessment, not a company policy, and it won't hand you a number to hit. What it will do is separate two questions that feel like one: are you ready to build a promotion case, or are you ready for something else to change. They're different conversations, and only one of them is a promotion case.
Levels attach to positions, not to effort
Companies don't hand out levels for effort. They assign them to positions. SHRM's guide to job leveling describes it as a systemic method of assigning value to individual positions, sorted by duties, responsibilities, and level of authority [2]. SHRM's career-paths toolkit says the same thing from the employee's side: each promotion brings increased responsibility, and it comes with higher compensation [3]. Read those together and the standard gets clear. The question isn't how well you performed your role. It's whether you've already been performing the next one.
Rebecca Knight's 2018 guide in Harvard Business Review puts almost all of the work before the ask itself: know exactly what you're asking for, collect the evidence, and line up support beyond your own manager [1]. That last piece is where most mid-career cases fall apart. A committee rarely promotes someone only their direct manager can vouch for.
The three checks: scope, sponsorship, continuity
Run these three checks before you book the meeting.
- Scope. Go back through your calendar and your project list. Mark every piece of work that belongs to the level above you: the analysis nobody asked you to do, the initiative you ran across two teams, the decision you made that used to go up a level. If that list is thin, you have a plan for the next stretch, not a case for this one.
- Sponsorship. Name the people outside your reporting line who have watched you do that work. Can your skip-level describe one of those projects without you in the room? Can a peer director? If the only person who can make your case is the person who writes your review, your case has one voice in a room with several.
- Continuity. Look at what happened to your core deliverables while you were reaching. If they slipped, leadership saw that too, and it reads as a warning rather than a readiness signal. The next level is a different load, and the test is whether you can carry more complexity without dropping what you already own.
Sit with the three answers. If the scope list is long, the sponsors are real, and nothing slipped, you're ready to build the case. If the list is thin and the honest reason you want this is that you're bored, restless, or underpaid, that's real too, and it's a different conversation: scope, comp, or a move. Asking for a promotion to solve any of those three tends to get you a no plus a story you didn't want.