Your next role will likely require responsibilities your current job doesn’t offer. The work you are given doesn’t just change how ready you look – it changes how ready you are. So choose your next move for what it lets you own.
You find a vacancy that looks like a realistic next step. You understand the work, and you have helped solve several of the problems it describes. Then you reach the requirements: experience managing a budget, leading a team, working across functions.
You have coordinated colleagues through a difficult project, but nobody reported to you. You have tracked expenditure and recommended savings, but your manager approved the spending. You have worked with other departments, usually after the important decisions were already made.
Another year in the same role will mostly give you more of what you already have.
So where are you supposed to get the experience?
Reliability Is Rewarded With More of the Same
Some of your CV reflects choices you made. Some of it reflects decisions other people made around you.
Someone chose who would lead the new project and who would keep the existing operation running. Someone chose who would cover for an absent manager, join the regional assignment, or should present to leadership. The reasons were often practical. You were dependable where you were, and moving you would have disrupted delivery.
That is the quiet trap. Reliability tends to be rewarded with more of the same work. The people an organisation relies on most are not always the people it develops most.
And the consequence is not only reputational. The work you are given does not just change how ready you look. Over time, it changes how ready you are.
Two people start equally capable. One is handed a budget to allocate; the other is not. A year later, one of them has made twenty funding decisions under real constraints, been wrong twice and adjusted. The other has not. That is not a difference in how they are perceived. It is a difference in what they can now do.
There is a second problem sitting behind the first. Even where you have carried real responsibility, a hiring process may not count it. Responsibility held without a title, work delivered as a consultant, a project run for a community organisation – all of it happened, and a screening process built to sort a large volume of applications quickly may register none of it. Experience that exists and experience in an assessment process are not the same thing.
A gap between what you have done and what an assessment will count may look identical; however, they call for completely different responses.
A Job Requirement Is Not a Verdict
So, examine a job requirement before you accept it as a judgment on you.
Take one role you could realistically hold next. Look underneath its listed requirements and write down what the person in it actually has to decide, deliver and answer for. Then work through that list against your own experience, responsibility by responsibility, sorting each one honestly into three categories:
- something you have done independently,
- something you have done with support, and
- something you have only watched.
The sorting matters because each category asks for something different.
Where you have relevant experience, you have simply never explained it well; the work is in the account – specific contributions, specific results, and people who can confirm them.
Where you exercised a responsibility with support, that counts. The question becomes what you need to practise before you can carry it alone.
Where you have only observed the work or never met it at all, no amount of rewriting will close the gap. You need an opportunity to practise it with guidance.
Be precise with yourself here. Coordinating colleagues is not the same as managing their performance. Tracking expenditure is not the same as deciding what to fund when there is not enough money for everything.
Not Every Useful Move Is Upward
Promotion is one route to new responsibility. A secondment – a temporary placement in another team or location – is another. So is a lateral move, or ownership of a defined project budget with agreed limits and a review date.
A useful move gives you three things at once:
- a responsibility you have not carried before,
- evidence of how you handled it, and
- people outside your own team who can describe your work from direct experience.
The third is the one people overlook. A finance colleague who watched you revise a forecast can explain how you approached the problem. An operations lead who saw you manage a difficult handover can speak to your judgement under pressure. A reference is a witness, and many professionals in their first years have witnesses in only one team.
Judge a move by what you would actually do in the role and how that serves your next step. Promotion may bring the pay and authority you genuinely need. A sideways move can change what you are actually able to do – often the better trade, provided you know exactly what you would own in it.
You Do Not Need a Programme to Get the Practice
Your organisation may have no secondment policy, no internal job board and no formal succession process. There may still be real responsibility available.
Acting cover while a manager is away. A defined part of a donor-funded project. Coordination between two departments currently working from different assumptions. Outside your employer, managing a professional association’s budget, or a defined activity in a family business.
The responsibility has to be genuine, with clear expectations and someone able to assess how you handled it. If it sits outside paid employment, agree its purpose, its time commitment and its end date, so that building experience does not quietly erode your income or the obligations you already carry.
Where authority follows seniority closely, make the boundaries explicit rather than leaving them to be discovered. Say what problem you could help solve, what you would take responsibility for, and which decisions stay with your manager. You can be open about the development you want while showing how the arrangement helps delivery.
Ask for a Responsibility, Not for Exposure
“I would like more exposure” leaves the opportunity undefined, which means someone else defines it.
Connect what you need to learn to something the organisation needs done. Suppose a project keeps slipping because operations and finance are working from different assumptions:
“Could I coordinate the next three months of the project, including the expenditure forecast and a monthly review with finance? I’d like to help resolve the differences between our plans and build my experience in this area. Could we agree what I can decide, where I need your approval, and how we’ll assess the result?“
Then settle the practical part. What comes off your current workload. Who guides you. Who reviews your decisions. If releasing you creates a delivery gap, offer a handover, a phased start or a narrower assignment.
Put the agreed scope and the review date in a short note. Daily pressure reshapes informal arrangements, and the note is what you and your manager return to when it does.
Watch for two traps:
- Attending meetings builds understanding without giving you practice at deciding anything.
- And a difficult project handed over without authority, time or guidance leaves you accountable for an outcome you cannot influence.
If temporary additional work quietly becomes a permanent expectation, reopen scope, pay and progression.
When the assignment ends, write down what you owned, the decisions you made, what happened and the feedback you received, using evidence you are permitted to share.
Numbers help where they mean something. Where they don’t, a specific account of a problem you resolved – one someone else can confirm – does the same work.
Watch How the No Is Given
Pay attention to how your organisation answers your requests, and to how it allocates opportunity to everyone else.
Are the criteria clear? When a proposal is impractical, does your manager help you find an alternative, or does the conversation simply end? Does an agreed review produce a decision, or another postponement? And look at who receives assignments, budgets and acting responsibilities – and how those choices get explained.
One refusal may be a practical constraint. Repeated postponement with no alternative offered tells you something more reliable about whether the route is genuinely open.
Set yourself a review point. If there is still no credible path to the responsibility you need, start looking at roles where that responsibility is simply part of the job – clear-eyed about the pay, stability and support you would need before moving.
You do not have to conclude that the whole organisation is unfair to recognise that it may no longer be the place where you develop.
Choose What Goes on the Record
Very little of this is about ambition. It is about noticing, earlier than most people do, that the responsibilities you are handed are building – or failing to build – the person you will be in five years. Those decisions get made in ordinary conversations about who covers what, by people thinking about this quarter’s delivery rather than your next decade.
You cannot control most of them. You can decide which responsibilities you ask for by name, which ones you get in writing, and which ones somebody was in a position to watch.
And none of it substitutes for handling the work well. A responsibility you asked for and then dropped is a more expensive record than one you never had.
So before your next development conversation, work through one realistic target role, find the gap that matters most, and identify where you could practise it and who could assess how you did. Then ask the question that actually moves something – not whether you are ready, but how you build the responsibility you are missing.
The vacancy will still ask whether you have done it before. The work between now and then is making sure that, somewhere and deliberately, you did.
