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Executive Career Pain Points
Information on case studies of director level executives that are aspiring for VP role promotion and experiencing pain points or challenges is not available. We have, however, provided some useful insights below.
HELPFUL FINDINGS
- One pain point in moving from director to VP is learning to delegate.
- Directors are concerned because of the stress in their current roles and fear what this next move could mean to work-life balance.
- The fear of failure and fear of not being good enough seems to shine through when making this specific leap for some people.
- Promotions from a director to a vice president require a major change in mindset and skillset.
- This promotion level also needs new dimensions of strength and toughness.
- Employees at the VP level also need to deal with the vast responsibility and complexity that the role demands.
- If one wants to move from director to VP, the CEO needs to have visibility into their accomplishments.
- Moving from director to VP, you need to learn what it means to be a VP by working with VPs.
- Exposure to a level of seniority is typically inversely proportional to the staff's current level.
- People at the director level working to move to VP also struggled with relying too much on their past performance when interviewing for the role of VP.
RESEARCH STRATEGY
The information on pain points director-level executives of companies face when aspiring for VP role promotions, in order to analyze a case study or direct case studies is not available.
It is likely that the area of pain point from director to VP has not been a major space of case studies. Even if studied, information has been put through in a general form (articles, blogs, among others) and no specific person from the tech industry has been covered.
The first approach taken by the research team to look for direct case studies on challenges faced by executives in the tech sector was to look for specific cases provided by HR consulting firms that cater to the technology space. We checked companies like acacia HR Solutions, Husys, HR Consultants, among others, at the niche level, and Aon Hewitt, Hay Group (part of Korn Ferry), and FranklinCovey hoping to find such specific case studies. Though these companies provided analysis in similar cases, they failed to reference the tech industry.
Next, we explored professional social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, among others, and other blogging sites and platforms like Reddit, Blogger, and Jekyll to look for case studies that executives may have stated themselves. We considered this as an approach since pages like LinkedIn and Facebook are also used for writing personal experiences especially in the case of C-level executives whereby they detail how they went through a situation, which a case study could have been put together. One such example is of Carey-Ann Oestreicher, whereby she has penned down her experience. However, the information is limited and the blog is focusing more on general shifts that need to occur once a person is promoted to a VP position, but no pain points or challenges were found. This strategy was also not successful as most discussions or blogs did not point out to cases referring to upward movement from a director to a VP role in the tech space.
Lastly, we moved on to check for career coaches opinions hoping to find data mentioned by those experts who help senior-level executives get promoted to the next level. Here, we were looking to find if these career coaches have mentioned any pain points that have been given to them as feedback from their clients who were promoted from a director to VP level. During this course, we checked sources like Forbes, Rita Ashley, Victor HR Consultant, Financial Post, among others, but we did not find any useful information. However, we did find sources whereby the career coaches have given tips on how to get promoted from a director to a VP level and have shared the clients' experiences.