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I have completed 1 year at my workplace and I would like to discuss my progress and milestones for my career with my reporting manager and lead developer.

I feel they are not interested in discussing it with me. I have never seen anyone here doing so! They just come to work and only focus on the projects delivery and nothing about technical development of team members.

Being a developer who wants to improve himself, how should I put these things forward to them and ask for career development advice as well as how I could improve upon my work.

How can I bring this up so that they will take this seriously?

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  • Does the corporation have a formal review process either on your work anniversary or on an annual basis? Do they mention reviews in the employee manual or HR documents? – mhoran_psprep Jul 17 '13 at 10:52
  • @mhoran_psprep the formal review process should held on the work anniversary as I was told before but they doesn't seems to be interested and I have not seen anyone going for it. – Siddharth Pandey Jul 17 '13 at 11:22
  • @JoeStrazzere I sent a mail few weeks back but got no response from any of them. And its about a month now and we have exchanged mails on other topics but not for this one. – Siddharth Pandey Jul 17 '13 at 11:26
  • This is a very closely related question (duplicate?) about a boss not caring about your development at all. – enderland Jul 17 '13 at 12:53
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It is absolutely vital that you understand the reasons behind your perception of your manager's lack of interest to discuss your performance.

As a starting point approach your manager and present him your view point and how you currently feel. Also share where you want to be and elicit guidance from them on how get there . Ask them to set goals for you (specific goals) and agree on checkpoints to measure & track progress.

As you have indicated that they are really keen just to deliver project goals, try & choose goals which would balance your learnings with project deliverables.

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How can I bring this up so that they will take this seriously?

There are a couple of different routes you can go depending on which way may seem more appropriate:

  1. Schedule a meeting and have a discussion about how your performance will be tracked, what career progressions exist and those other issues you want to mention. The key here is to have a good idea of what questions you want answered as well as keep in mind that this should be a relatively short meeting of about 15 minutes so that they have the heads-up that you want to know about upcoming stuff.

  2. Informally, invite the manager or team lead for a coffee or lunch sometime and have a conversation about it there. This is the rather informal route though the idea here is that you may get a more honest answer here as the other route is formal and thus could be seen as being all about the work, while this is on the border in some ways. "Don't worry about it," is something that could be said here that isn't as likely in the other case.

Another angle on this is to consider that if this is a small company that is struggling to survive, then you may not be realizing that the company has bigger issues to handle like surviving for the next year. I have worked at companies that did go under and at times, formal reviews and career goals wouldn't be covered because there were more important things or there just wasn't an HR person in the company yet to handle that paperwork.

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