[acrooks]

Unless you’re in a startup environment or otherwise small company, your company will likely have some sort of rubric for your job’s career ladder.

These rubrics are built to try to help managers make impartial, and objective decisions. This is not only more fair but more structure also helps reduce liability related to discrimination. The downside of this structure means that even though you may have contributed substantially, you don’t meet the specific guidelines for promotion.

So I recommend asking your manager for the career ladder information, if you’re in an organisation where one exists, and ask for feedback as to why they feel you don’t meet the criteria for the next step. That feedback will help you figure out whether they’re just “missing something” or if they see gaps.

[acrooks]

I should also add as a +1: if you’re in engineering (and I suppose this extends to many other job roles but I’ll speak for eng for now), the difference between say an intermediate and a senior is not completely a factor of contribution, but also of experience.

A less experienced engineer might push an impressive amount of code, but a more experienced and senior engineer will get to the correct solution much more quickly, and more often the first time. Over a longer time scale this will become clear as a senior engineer’s API spec stands the test of time (less versioning) or their architecture doesn’t require a rewrite or their data model can be extended without downtime-inducing migrations.

I’m saying this as a self-taught engineer since 8 years old who consistently closed more tickets than my peers. For a long time I wondered why I was less senior or paid less than them, and as I became more senior myself it became clear that seniority was more a factor of how often my instinctual decisions were the correct call, because I had solved that problem before, and less because of my raw delivery.