hi everyone kevin here today i want to share one of my best career moves ever and that was interviewing at amazon if you looked at my linkedin or maybe you’ve seen some videos on this channel before you probably know that i never actually worked at amazon i worked at microsoft for 14 years and now i’m working on this youtube channel full time so what does amazon have to do with any of this well i’ll share the details in a moment but it was by far one of the best career moves this happened about four years ago in 2016 and i had been at microsoft at that point for about nine years and i felt like my career wasn’t really progressing all that fast one promotion every three years at that point especially when you’re earlier in your career you expect to get promoted more quickly and as you move up the ranks within the company the promotions will slow down adding to that the organization i was in at the time i got the sense that the manager didn’t really care about my career growth all that much and to be fair i was reporting to a corporate vice president so you could probably imagine what happened i’d go in for my weekly meeting with the cvp if i even had a weekly meeting and i’d say oh this is what’s going on with my work here’s what’s going on and i’d probably say about three or four sentences and he said okay great sounds good are we done now at the time i was earning a very good salary i was making about a hundred fifty two thousand dollars per year and that’s nothing to complain about that’s an extremely good salary you look at the entire world and what the median income is this is at the very very top but i think what it goes to show is salary does not equal happiness being appreciated being valued is so much greater than what you’re being paid because i had been at microsoft for as long as i had been at the company i had a lot of connections and so i was somewhat unhappy and so i was open to opportunities but i wasn’t actively looking so periodically i’d have friends of mine who i used to work with who’d reach out and say hey kevin are you interested in you know potentially coming to facebook are you interested in potentially coming to amazon sure let’s let’s check it out let’s consider what these opportunities are i ended up connecting with a manager who was in charge of the subscribe and save team at amazon i went into amazon i met with a whole bunch of people i went through the interview process it was your typical behavioral interview questions where they look at what have you done in the past and how are you going to contribute in the future and so the interview all went very well i really liked the team i ended up interviewing at amazon and i got an offer for a full-time job and it turned out that the package was even better than what i was getting at microsoft they offered me about thirteen thousand dollars more per year and all i had to do was switch companies and i basically get an immediate boost to my income now one of the things that i i think is completely true is when you stay at the same company for a long time in my case i had been at microsoft for nine years every year even if you’re doing well or you’re performing very well you’ll get a salary boost of three four maybe five percent and every year you get your three four percent so you’re going up very slowly when you interview at another company you have the opportunity to take bigger steps where you jump up a lot greater here by jumping to amazon i was going to get a much bigger salary increase of course switching companies also carries risk and they offered 13 000 more which it’s a lot of money but i was doing well at microsoft i’d been at the company for a while i knew the environment and so i went back to amazon and i said oh you know that’s not quite enough to convince me to move and i listed out all the different benefits i would bring to the company and then amazon came back and we negotiated a little bit and i got a 6 000 increase above that so now with my second amazon offer i was already twenty thousand dollars per year above where i was working at microsoft while all of this was happening i also had a re-org and microsoft or reorganization basically the manager who i had been reporting to moved elsewhere and then a new manager came in with a new manager i had a much better relationship now i can’t stress this enough and i’ve said this in some of my other videos before but the manager you have is one of the biggest contributors to your satisfaction in a job despite having a new manager i now had an offer in hand and when i thought about either staying at microsoft or leaving to go to amazon amazon was offering me more it was closer to where i lived it was also the opportunity to work at another company on another team and potentially get even faster career growth it really made sense to go to amazon so all i had to do at that point was go to my new manager who i had a good relationship with and tell her that i was going to leave microsoft she then said okay can you walk me through your thought process and your reasoning for why you want to go to amazon now what i really appreciated is she wanted to hear out the reasons for why i was unhappy or maybe why i didn’t feel quite appreciated so she listened to all of the reasons and she said before you leave and before you accept the offer can you just hear us out and maybe i can set up a talk with you and the vp now this is a different vp than the one i was reporting to and of course i want to hear them out and so i said sure let’s let’s talk i’m willing to do that but i’m pretty set on going to amazon i don’t think i’m going to change my mind so at this point i agreed to talk to the cvp to see what the cvp would have to say so i went in and i met the cvp i’d never actually met them on a one-on-one basis but i’d heard the cvp talk before and so we sat down in a conference room and the first thing he said was kevin what level are you and so i said oh you know i’m this level and he said no you’re not you’re actually this level and that was the next level up and he said you’re being promoted right now you’re gonna get an immediate promotion and so i said okay and then he followed up by saying what did amazon offer you and so i said well you know they’re offering me this and he said okay well we’ll make sure we beat it and we’ll make sure we give you more than what amazon’s offering because we don’t want to lose you we want you to stay at microsoft and so i was a little i was a little blown away that the response was that quick and that’s swift when they offered me my new package and when i worked with hr on the new package the new package was 168 thousand dollars per year now keep in mind i was in the low 150s before so i pretty much got a 17 000 salary increase or about 11 gain and all i did was interview at another company get an offer and microsoft wanted to keep me so they offered even more that was the easiest salary increase i ever got or i don’t know about easy but it was a lot easier than spending years and years of working to maybe get a promotion out of it i now had a new offer from microsoft which was significantly better than what i had been earning at microsoft but it also beat the amazon offers so as a good negotiator i went back to amazon and i said hey microsoft just promoted me given that i wanted to leave to go to amazon can you offer anything else to make this more enticing and amazon came back and said that’s as much as we’re going to offer that’s our final offer so when i compared the offers the microsoft offer was now quite a bit better than the amazon offer so i decided to stay at microsoft now of course the salary was a big component of that but it was also feeling appreciated and also now having a manager who cared and was willing to listen to my concerns and to make sure that my concerns were addressed along with getting an immediate promotion i also found that my career trajectory then became a lot quicker it took me nine years to get three promotions and then i got an additional three promotions in four years so in about less than half the time i got promoted just as many times so definitely course corrected and i started moving up in the company a lot faster now if there’s anything to take away from this story it’s if you’re unhappy or maybe you don’t feel appreciated or you’re not enjoying where you are there are many options out there there’s so many companies there’s so many places you could work there are so many different managers you’re just because you’re currently in a job doesn’t mean you’re locked in that job and you have to stay in that job you can look at different options you can interview elsewhere and if you’re going to interview elsewhere make sure you interview at multiple places now in my story i only interviewed at amazon and then amazon and microsoft competed for me but ideally you’d interview it two three places it’s like if you’re putting out a bid for a contract you don’t just go to one person you go to three or four and you get multiple bids that’s how you get the best deal when you interview at multiple places you could get multiple offers and then you have more to compare and i know it’s a difficult economic time but if you feel that you’re worth more than where you are right now or if you’re unhappy the last thing you want to do is stay in a situation like that instead you should evaluate other opportunities if you have good skills and you could contribute to an organization you will find places that want you i hope you found this video helpful i wanted to share a little bit of my career story so hopefully this can help you as well as you’re going throughout your career if you enjoyed this style of video please give it a thumbs up that gives me a signal that this is a video that all of you enjoy and i’ll produce more of them if you want to see future videos like this hit that subscribe button that way you’ll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out and let me know what other topics do you want to see leave a comment down below alright that’s all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye [Music] you