Wondering if anyone has any thoughts/experiences on the best way to go about this. Have a wife and nine kids in the Indianapolis area so don’t want to relocate. TC: 650K YOE: 12
650k at Indianapolis? Jez!!
Nine kids?
1 more on the way! 😄
You are insane. Does 650k even cover day care?
I can't speak to Indy, but my dad was at that level at his company before he retired in the Midwest. Admittedly, this was a while back, but the principle stands. He also wasn't in tech, so his TC was way lower... To go from senior director to VP, he would have been expected to own the long term strategy for his line of business. At his org, VPs on up owned the long term strategy, directors on down executed it and had varying but generally fairly minimal levels of ownership of the strategy. For example, a VP might be responsible for growing the P&L for their LOB from $50M to $125M over the next three years, while a director might be responsible for executing his portion of the plan the VP comes up with (e.g. a sales director would be tasked with executing the sales portion of that growth strategy). The VP is also responsible for integrating their LOB strategy with the overall company strategy and looking for synergies with other LOBs. In my experience, that's the key differentiator, the VP is more focused on the holistic strategy and integration with the overall company, directors are focused more on particular aspects of the tactical side of things. YMMV, though, some smaller organizations don't have that kind of clear differentiation between the two levels, if they even exist. It's really a matter of scope. A director might be responsible for a team of, say, 100 people in his domain, while a VP might be responsible for a team of 500 across multiple domains.
In addition, unless you're a rainmaker in your org or create and grow a brand new, major service offering, it can be nearly impossible to go from director/senior director to VP unless there's churn at that level. There's generally gotta be headcount available at the VP level to create a new VP, and that's often substantially harder than new headcount at the D/SD level without a vacancy opening up. My dad worked for the same firm for the last 15 years of his career and spent the first 6-7 of those years trying to make a business case to get the VP promo. Each year he got declined because there wasn't enough business opportunity to support the promo. After the 6th or 7th decline, he decided to retire, but found enough excuses to keep bumping out the retirement by a year, since he was by far the best person in that domain at his org and they'd have been up schitt creek without a paddle if he'd retired. And then, to no end of amusement on his part, for the last 3-4 years before he finally retired, they kept trying to get him to take the VP slot his boss vacated when that guy retired. For about the last 10 years of his career, he was getting headhunted pretty much non-stop for various VP roles at firms across the US. I'd say your best bet, unless a VP slot opens up in your org, is to test the market.
Which ladder are you on ?
If it’s indy I am assuming you work for exacttarget
I'm in a similar situation at Google, though not sure how director-to-vp maps across the two places. The three ways I'm seeing people make the leap here is: 1.) You are the director on a fast-growing division and keep hiring peers to own newly-emerging large chunks - at some point, someone decides it's weird you're managing 4 other directors and you get moved to VP. This is predicated on being on a killer product area and relies on bureaucracy to propel you forward. 2.) You create a new org to be VP of - you might start as a director while doing it, but if it's a new org you can get moved to VP for taking it from 0 to 1, unlike option 1 where it's about taking it through growth stage. 3.) Someone you're close to leaves their VP spot and anoints you their heir. This route is the most frequent one in my world if you are going to stay at your company - at this level, there are so few roles that without nepotism, it's pretty tough. Of course, the other route is to leave and get the VP title at a slightly smaller firm 😊
You make 650k at Salesforce as a Sr. Director? Or is that total wife family income or stock appreciation? What's your TC breakdown?...
If you have to ask ...
I wanted to get a sense of how many people were internally promoted as to switching companies.