Change Your Role, Not Your Title

Evolve So Quickly Your Title Can’t Keep Up

It has been said that change is the only constant, and I am fortunate to have embraced a ton of change over the last 2 1/2 years at Redbeacon. For my first year there I worked under a magical title, Wizard, that was vague enough to encompass the numerous functions I was responsible for handling daily. While the roll itself saw constant change early on, our acquisition by The Home Depot six months after I started accelerated the pace of change I had been experiencing by orders of magnitude.

I always knew I eventually wanted a more normal title, but I tried not to think too much about it. I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that you pay your dues first, then you get rewarded. I was luckier than most to have a role that evolved so quickly, so worrying about a title seemed petty. Instead I grabbed any opportunity to grow that I could; as soon as the need to learn SQL and pull data presented itself, I hopped on it as quickly as I could.

But rather than using what I was doing as a reason to ask for a title change, I used a milestone that dealt with something more tangible: time. Once I hit my one year anniversary I requested a change to something more easily recognized by the masses: Business Analyst.

Looking back, I realized that the reason I was granted a title change was because I had changed my role to a business analyst long before I had requested the change. Startups like Redbeacon present opportunity and support personal growth for its employees. If you find yourself in a similar situation, don’t worry too much about what you were hired for or what your title says. Instead, do whatever you can to act as if you have already been promoted — it might just get you the title you want.