Why Summer Is The Best Time To Ask For A Promotion

Photo by margot pandone on Unsplash

As you are firing up the courage to ask for your promotion, consider the timing of your request. While some of us consider summer to be a time for vacation getaways and summer Fridays, this season may be the best time to hustle and move up in your career, according to a new report from workforce analytics company Visier. In its analysis of 3.5 million employees at nearly 80 U.S. companies, Vizier found that summer was the best time to ask for a promotion.

“When Visier analyzed promotions rates by seasonality, they found that for three years in a row, promotions were 3 to 3.5 percent more likely to occur in the summer,” Ian Cook, Visier’s Head of Workforce Solutions, told Ladders.

Why summer promotions are more likely to happen

The rise of the summer promotion could be due to the tempo of the fiscal calendar. While other seasons of the work year focus external business growth, summer may be the time to work on internal hiring.

“Promotions typically follow a performance review cycle, such as reviews in the winter, and raises and promotions locked in during the second quarter,” Cook said. “In the fall, companies tend to take stock of the year-to-date and complete a financial wrap-up. They’re creating budgets, making targets, and planning for the upcoming year. Due to this cycle, internal promotions are not top-of-mind for employers. Alternatively, they are focused on how to best prepare the company for the future year.”

This is an unseen advantage of the summer slump. Your boss may have more time to pay attention to your professional development when they are not being pulled six ways in other directions to fulfill metrics.

If you’re a young Millennial, the odds of getting a promotion are in your favor, Visier found. Employees ages 25-30 got the most promotions out of any age group, which makes sense since they are in the building years of their career.

There is also heartening news for those of us who have been told to bide our time and wait for that career boost to happen. The length of time an employee had been at the company did not necessarily correlate to increased odds of getting a promotion.

“People who have worked at a company for more than 15 years were the least likely group to receive a promotion,” Cook said. “The best time for promotion may be by your third year. That’s the time when the odds of a promotion are highest.”

This article originally appeared on Ladders written by Monica Torres.