From soft-skills
Builds promotion cases, brag documents, and tracks accomplishments for self-advocacy and career advancement. Use for performance reviews or documenting impact.
How this skill is triggered — by the user, by Claude, or both
Slash command
/soft-skills:promotion-preparationThis skill is limited to the following tools:
The summary Claude sees in its skill listing — used to decide when to auto-load this skill
This skill provides frameworks for building compelling promotion cases, maintaining brag documents, tracking accomplishments, and effectively advocating for your career advancement.
This skill provides frameworks for building compelling promotion cases, maintaining brag documents, tracking accomplishments, and effectively advocating for your career advancement.
promotion, brag document, promotion case, self-advocacy, wins, accomplishments, impact, career advancement, tracking wins, promotion document, manager alignment, performance review, evidence-based promotion
Critical insight: Promotions are not handed out - they are earned and advocated for.
Your manager:
Your responsibility:
A promotion case document is your comprehensive argument for advancement. It serves multiple purposes:
Document specific achievements with measurable outcomes:
Show trajectory and development:
Demonstrate readiness for next level:
A brag document (also called "work log" or "wins journal") is your ongoing record of accomplishments.
| Frequency | Activity |
|---|---|
| Weekly | Quick bullet points of wins (5-10 min) |
| Monthly | Review and expand bullets, add context |
| Quarterly | Synthesize themes, identify patterns |
| Annually | Build promotion case from accumulated evidence |
For each win, capture:
Not all wins are created equal. Categorize to show breadth:
| Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery | Shipped features, projects, products | "Launched payment v2, processing $2M/day" |
| Quality | Improved reliability, reduced bugs | "Reduced error rate from 2% to 0.1%" |
| Efficiency | Faster, cheaper, better processes | "Cut deploy time from 2 hours to 15 min" |
| Innovation | New approaches, creative solutions | "Introduced caching strategy saving $50K/year" |
| Leadership | Mentoring, leading, enabling others | "Mentored 2 engineers to senior level" |
| Collaboration | Cross-team work, partnerships | "Led joint initiative with 3 teams" |
| Scope | Description | Next Level Signal |
|---|---|---|
| Individual | Your personal contribution | Expected at current level |
| Team | Improved your team's outcomes | Mid → Senior |
| Multi-team | Impact across multiple teams | Senior → Staff |
| Org-wide | Shaped organizational outcomes | Staff → Principal |
Visibility is not self-promotion - it's professional communication:
Weak: "I worked on the new API"
Strong: "I designed and implemented the new payments API, which reduced integration time from 2 weeks to 2 days and enabled 3 new partner integrations in Q3"
Formula: Action + Specifics + Measurable Outcome
Understanding how managers view promotions helps you prepare effectively:
What managers need:
What makes promotion easy:
What makes promotion hard:
For detailed guidance, see:
references/promotion-case-structure.md - Complete promotion document template with examplesreferences/brag-document-guide.md - Weekly/monthly tracking templates and tipsreferences/win-categorization.md - Multi-dimensional win classification frameworkreferences/manager-perspective.md - What managers look for, how to aligncareer-strategy - Level expectations, progression paths, and career planningcareer-strategy - Internal vs external growth decisionsinterview-skills - Using accomplishments in interviews/soft-skills:promotion-preparation - Generate a structured promotion case document/soft-skills:track-win - Document an accomplishment in brag document formatWhen invoked directly by the user, this skill supports two workflows: building a promotion case and assessing career readiness.
When invoked with role arguments (e.g., <current-role> <target-role> [achievements...]):
career-strategy skill for target level competency expectations.When invoked with assessment intent (e.g., promotion, job-change, level <target>):
Date: 2025-12-26 Model: claude-opus-4-5-20251101
npx claudepluginhub melodic-software/claude-code-plugins --plugin soft-skillsPersonal career advisor for job search, resume review, interview prep, salary negotiation, performance reviews, and Staff Engineer progress tracking. Gives direct, honest advice.
Transforms accomplishment descriptions into structured brag document entries with categorization, achievement bullets, quantified impacts, and skills demonstrated. Useful for promotion prep and performance reviews.
Use this skill when the user asks "how do I become a senior PM", "what does senior PM actually mean", "I want to get promoted to senior", "what's the difference between PM and senior PM", "I've been a PM for 2–3 years and want to grow", "my manager says I need to work more strategically", "I'm stuck at PM level", or wants to understand the specific behaviors and skills that separate a PM from a Senior PM. Do NOT use this skill for VP or CPO-level career questions — use solo-to-cpo for that.